The Man Who Ate the World (28 page)

No one knows this better than Gordon Ramsay, whose restaurant at the London Hotel, where I was staying, had received a kicking since its opening in November 2006. Some of the criticism had come from the old media. A major profile in
The New Yorker
magazine had portrayed a shambolic operation with a gifted, ambitious, but troubled chef desperately trying to play catch-up. The review in the
Times
had been mediocre. “For all his brimstone and bravado,” Frank Bruni wrote of Ramsay, “his strategy for taking Manhattan turns out to be a conventional one, built on familiar French ideas and techniques that have been executed with more flair, more consistency and better judgment in restaurants with less-vaunted pedigrees.”

What had really damaged the place, what had really put it on the back foot, was a constant stream of bad stories on the blogs. First there was Bruni announcing that, when he booked, he had been told he could only have his table for two hours. He was also informed that he had to wear a shirt and jacket. “Glad to have that spelled out,” Bruni responded. “Like many a New York diner, I often enter restaurants bare-chested.”

Then, Eater.com revealed that the place was threatened by an all-out strike by non-unionized European staff who had discovered they were going to be cut out of the tip pool. Neighbors also moaned to the blogs about smells from the extraction units. It was okay when they were cooking bacon, they said, lousy when it was duck. Naturally, I read every single one of these stories, hungering for any snippet of gossip I could find, for I liked to live the life of the virtual restaurant goer.

The restaurant’s spokespeople tried to claim these were just normal teething problems—that the two-hour limit was a mistake by an overzealous reservation clerk; that the union-tips issue was just a little local labor difficulty—but the sense that the restaurant was in trouble was unavoidable, not least because Ramsay quickly sacked his head chef, Neil Ferguson, and replaced him with a New Zealander called Josh Emett.

Ramsay’s restaurants now felt to me like embassies for Britain’s culinary efforts, their chefs the ambassadors whom I called upon as a matter
of courtesy if I happened to be in town. I had eaten at his place in Dubai and interviewed his chef there, Jason Whitelock. In Tokyo I had met up with Andy Cook, Ramsay’s head chef at the Conrad Tokyo. Now I was in the kitchen at the London sipping coffee with Emett.

“I find it all mind blowing,” Emett told me. “There’s just so much information out there, and we’re constantly trying to work out where it’s coming from. You just don’t get that sort of thing in London.”

I asked him if he read everything. “Jean Baptiste [the maître d’] reads everything and he tells me what to read and what not to read.” For a while he brooded on the fact that they had been ridiculed for not knowing the precise definition of a Nantucket scallop when they put the term on the menu. “I was concentrating on other things, not geography, so we came a cropper on the whole Nantucket scallops thing.” He looked around at his huge brigade of chefs busily preparing for the lunch service. “You only have to look at how much effort is going into this to know how serious we are about it.” And then, almost desperately, “We did this exactly the same as any opening. We didn’t do anything differently.” He was at a loss as to why they had received so much negative publicity.

I thought I knew why. A couple of nights before we met, I had eaten at Gordon Ramsay at the London Hotel, in the subdued melancholia of the dining room with its mother-of-pearl-style walls and its gloomy elegance. If this room had been a person, it would have been an elderly lady in an expensive cashmere two-piece, hair just so, ankles crossed tidily under the table: attractive but hardly exciting. That night I had eaten, well, I had eaten . . . food. There was a scallop dish. There was a duck dish. There was something with sweetbreads and an apple tarte tatin. It was all expertly prepared. It was all assured and confident. No one should ever attempt to deny the glossy professionalism of the Ramsay operation.

It was also completely unmemorable. What did stay with me was the clientele. Just as Ramsay’s in Dubai had been it was full of English people: a couple of braying posh boys in rugby shirts; some girls in footballers’ wives dresses with bottle-blond hair; a few mousy English
couples, fidgeting at their seats. Dubai had been Guilford. This was suburban London, a little farther into town, but not by much.

That night, after dinner, I went to my hotel room thirty-five floors above, fired up the laptop, and went looking for other people’s thoughts on Gordon Ramsay’s attempt to take Manhattan. I read reviews on both egullet and OA, many of which agreed with me, some of which did not. I browsed pictures of platefuls of neoclassical dishes—seared protein, reduced sauce, turned baby vegetables—and grew tired. It was when I started looking for reviews on Mouthfuls that I decided I had had enough. I was done with this restaurant. I didn’t need other people to confirm for me that my money had bought me a boring experience. I logged off, closed the laptop, and went to bed. I decided I could stop worrying about my Internet gastro-porn habit. I was clearly making progress.

T
here was one hot place in town that didn’t appear much on the discussion boards. It was called the Waverly Inn and it didn’t appear much because few people on the discussion boards could get into it. The Waverly Inn, an old-style pub in the West Village, with low ceilings, black beams, and saggy red banquettes, was now part-owned by Graydon Carter, editor of
Vanity Fair,
who had styled it as a clubhouse not for the people who read his magazine but for those who appeared in it. In the few months since it had reopened after a makeover in the autumn of 2006, it had become a regular haunt for the likes of Sean Penn and Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Robbins, Robert De Niro, and Bono. Getting a table was not simply a matter of phoning up the restaurant.

For months, if you did call the number, you would hear a voice (on a machine that didn’t take messages) saying it wasn’t yet officially open. Notionally it was in a try-out period, but this went on for week after week, and its dining rooms were always full. It was open but not open. If you were so presumptuous as to want to eat there, you had to call the only real reservation clerk, who was one of Graydon Carter’s assistants in
the Condé Nast building in Times Square. Assuming you knew either Carter or his assistant.

If John Whiteclay Chambers were mapping New York’s power restaurants now, he would, of course, include the Waverly, and naturally I thought I should eat there, too. I had heard that, while it was a scene—the presence of so many film stars turned it into a movie set—the food was rather good. I had just one possible route by which to get a booking. As a sometime contributor to
Gourmet,
itself a Condé Nast publication, I would simply have to debase myself by shamelessly begging the office of
Gourmet’s
editor to make a call on my behalf to Graydon Carter’s office.

I received an e-mail, suggesting I had about as much chance of getting a seat as joining the kick line of the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, but that they would see what they could do. Then came the startling news that, by some miracle, through some unexpected rupture in the fabric of time and space, they had found a table for me.

And so, on a Friday night, I went to the Waverly Inn. As I stood in the bar with my friend Greg, a senior editor on another magazine, I scanned the room for faces that I recognized. I was looking for Gwyneth, Sean, or Bobby. I didn’t see anyone. Later we were led into the dining room, with its dimly lit corner tables and its mural of all the famous New York faces by Edward Sorel—the likes of Norman Mailer, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Marlon Brando. I saw all those faces on the wall, but only in passing because we were led into the dining room—and straight back out again into what is widely regarded as the Siberia of the garden room. There had been nobody famous at the tables in the dining room and there was nobody famous out here, either.

I ordered a bowl of chili to start, and then a veal chop. Greg had a chicken pot pie, under a dome of golden puff pastry. It was comfort food, very good comfort food, as it happens, but comfort food all the same.

“You realize,” Greg said to me over his pie, “that you are the only person here I have ever heard of.”

Drunk on the cheapest bottle of wine on the list, I took him seriously.
“I’m not famous,” I said, puffing myself up at the thought that my writing had finally given me a profile in New York.

“Er, no, you’re not. That’s my point. I’ve only heard of you because you’re a friend of mine. Everybody else here is a complete nonentity, just like you.” Then he slumped back in his seat, struck by a thought. “Of course! It’s a Friday night. Everybody worth seeing has been helicoptered off to their place in the Hamptons.” I had debased myself to get into the hottest restaurant in town, on one of the few nights when it was as hot as Alaska in February.

We looked around the room. It was full of boys in bandannas, and the girls who love them. Greg told me most of them would have been personal assistants to media big wheels, taking the place of the big wheels themselves. I had no reason to doubt him. Conversations were shrieked, air-kisses puckered out like so many rounds of automatic gunfire. The room was filled with the smell of lip gloss and highly flammable hair gel. I wished I had a cattle prod to hand. These were people I could never have tired of hurting.

It all seemed a terrible waste of a perfectly nice restaurant, with nice food at a not unreasonable price. Suddenly I found myself thinking back over my restaurant experiences: to the bottle-blondes at Ramsay’s and the social X-rays at Jean-Georges, to the braying Russians in the gilded restaurants of Dubai, and the big-ticket Americans in their red suspenders, clanking their fiercely expensive bottles of wine into ice buckets at Pushkin in Moscow. Now an image came to me, a clear and unappetizing picture of the kind of people who occupy the dining rooms I so often review in London, and that in turn led me to an unavoidable truth:

If you want to see what skilled professionals can do with very sharp knives to expensive pieces of meat, you could do worse than visit one of
the top restaurants in New York, London, Paris, Moscow, or Dubai. You’ll find enough face-lifts in those dining rooms to make a whole new party of six from the off-cuts. You know the sort: shoes by Manolo Blahnik, scarf by Hermès, permanent look of surprise by the hottest surgeon in town—and that’s only the men.

Or maybe you don’t know the sort, but I do. This has been the true horror of my job as a restaurant critic. Yes, I get to sit in opulent dining rooms, eating extraordinary food and having Dom Pérignon squeezed into my mouth from a South Seas sponge, and all on somebody else’s dime. But I also have to do this surrounded by the sort of trussed and lacquered, gold-encrusted, preening, lobotomized, bigoted, tasteless, self-satisfied, self-abusing, arguments for involuntary euthanasia—Won’t somebody put these bloody people out of my misery?—that, even in this post-Soviet era, could make a strong argument for Bolshevik revolution.

From such long, selfless service watching them clank their jewelry on the tableware and from listening to their inbred caterwauling over their
amuse-gueles
, I had reached a profound conclusion: Expensive restaurant experiences are generally wasted on the very people who can afford them.

Let me give you an example, possibly
the
example. In July 2001, the international press thrilled to the news that a party of bankers had run up a bill of £44,007 ($87,151) for a single dinner at the London restaurant Petrus. The restaurant is named after arguably the greatest red wine in the world, and certainly the most expensive. During the meal the boys ordered three bottles of it: a 1945 at £11,600 ($17,400), a 1946 at £9,400 ($14,100), and a 1947—regarded as the greatest vintage of them all—at £12,300 ($18,450). There was also a £1,400 ($2,100) Montrachet and a £9,300 ($13,950) Château d’Yquem. (Two bottles of Kronenborg beer accounted for the extra £7 [$10.50].)

While the rest of the world was thrilled by this remarkable exercise in pure, unadulterated bling, the wine world was quietly singing a different song. These men were obviously scalp hunters who simply wanted to chalk up the trio of sequential vintages for no other reason than because
they could. The truth is that, while the ’45 and the ’47 genuinely are two of the most important wines of the last century, the ’46 is regarded as a non-starter. It just happens to be old. If these people had really cared, they would have ordered a couple of bottles of the two other vintages and ignored the ’46 altogether.

More to the point, if drinking these wines had genuinely meant something to them—beyond the opportunity for cock waving—they wouldn’t have gone to Petrus in the first place. They would have gone to an auction house and bought them there because, in July 2001, even the 1947 was going under the hammer for a little over £4,000 ($6,000). In short, these great, totemic wines were drunk by people who were not worthy of them.

This is not petty snobbery. Or, at least, it’s not
just
petty snobbery. It’s important. The enduring taste-bypass exhibited by the moneyed classes at Petrus goes a very long way to explaining why, for so many decades, food in Britain has had such a stunted culture compared to somewhere like France. In France, the food culture is a bottom-up affair, with high gastronomy only being its ultimate expression. The notion of Le Terroir to which every Frenchman cleaves—that there is a specific piece of land from which their identity comes—may well encourage gastronomic conservatism, but it does at least lend the whole business a certain democracy.

In Britain, food is, and always has been, from the top down. From the moment the Industrial Revolution herded the peasantry off the land into the cities so they could spin wool and send their children up chimneys, the link with the land was broken. It left the way open for the British aristocracy to reinvent food as a status symbol. Off they went on their grand tours. They traveled Europe, ate interesting food, and hired the people who cooked it. The first of these culinary scalps, Antonin Carême, who came to Britain in the early nineteenth century to cook for the Prince Regent, was also the most typical.