The Man Who Ate the World (36 page)

I couldn’t deny that I did, the long-braised and gelatinous cockscombs standing proudly to attention across a plate scattered with impeccable rounds of lobster, slices of black truffle, curls of soft pasta, the whole bound by a rich, defiantly classical butter and cream sauce.

It was, I realized, the very first dish I had ever liked in a restaurant with Alain Ducasse’s name on it. Usually I made a point of hating Ducasse restaurants, much as I made a point of hating evangelical Christians or people who appeared in
Hello!
magazine. It was a matter of principle. I had hated Mix in Las Vegas so much, I had considered suicide, just to spite them; in London I had hated Spoon, for its self-conscious hipness and stupid concept, involving a menu written in pidgin English that allowed the punters to put together food items that didn’t deserve to be in the same restaurant let alone on the same plate. I had even hated the venerable Parisian bistro Benoit, which Ducasse had recently purchased, for its lazy, cynical service and its lazy, cynical pricing. Hating Alain Ducasse restaurants was what I did.

Still, I knew that he must have something going for him. After
winning three stars at the Hotel Louis XV in Monaco in 1990, he had opened in Paris, first at Le Parc Sofitel Demeure Hôtel, later here at the Plaza Athénée Hotel just off the Champs Elysées. It’s the sort of ludicrously glitzy place where you might, as I did, see a woman in a Louis Vuitton eyepatch; where just one of the cars parked outside is worth more than your own house. In 2001, Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée won its third star and he became the only chef in the world to have two restaurants with the maximum rating (before becoming the only chef in the world with three such restaurants, when he added the Essex House in New York, which he later closed). He was the king of the globalized chef crew, the master of the diffusion line. I might have hated his restaurants, but a lot of other people liked them.

Now I was beginning to like one as well. I even liked the curious orange and gray interior, and the exploded chandeliers that scattered the room with shards of light. True, it had some silly affectations: the pull-out shelves built into the seats so women had somewhere to put their handbags, the holders for the menus because, as one of my companions put it, “heaven forefend rich people should have to do anything as strenuous as hold something themselves.” But the service was relaxed and genuinely friendly. They hadn’t even flinched when they saw my friend Joe in his jeans and trainers and T-shirt.

In the days before my trip I had sent out an e-mail to those in my circle with an equally profound interest in their lunch and the willingness to spend big money on it. I couldn’t afford to buy them a meal in a Paris three-star, I said, but I could give them the excuse to come and have a meal in a Paris three-star. A whole bunch of people had said yes, starting today with Maureen, a London restaurant PR who made a habit of coming to Paris to eat, and Joe, a food writer and magazine editor in his late thirties, who was famed for dressing like a bloody teenager.

“I’m a good test of the service, actually,” he said, defensively. “If they treat me well despite what I’m wearing, it’s a good place.”

“You are,” I said, “the canary in the mineshaft.”

“Exactly.”

Soon I forgot about his garish T-shirt as we focused on the menu. As well as a few spectacular dishes involving caviar and the like, clearly priced in such a way as to appeal to deposed world leaders looking for the means by which to spend the wealth they had plundered from their former subjects, the menu listed nine dishes priced at the 85 euro ($125) mark. Although it wasn’t specifically pointed out to us, we could also have three of these plus cheese and dessert for 220 euros ($325) as a tasting menu. In the twisted, looking-glass world of the Paris three-star, this is what is known as a bargain.

“Here’s the question,” I said. “Have I been offered the tasting menu?”

“It has been placed before you,” Joe said.

“But does that mean we should have it?”

They both looked at me as if I were an idiot. Of course we should have it: nine dishes, three people. Do the math. We could eat the whole menu.

So we did, sharing every plate with each other as we went. There was the spider crab, in its shell, topped by a sweet-savory foam that was like inhaling the taste of the sea; there was the tranche of turbot with the old-school red-wine sauce that I found myself spooning from its little jug straight to my mouth; the perfectly cooked piece of sea bass with the citrus sauce; the deep pink pigeon with the mustardy crust, the sweetbread with girolles mushrooms. There was nothing startling here, nothing unusual or showy, just clean refined neoclassicism. I decided I might be in for a rather thrilling week, the more so when the waiter fumbled a piece of lamb and sent it flying through the air in a gentle parabola.

I have always loved these moments. High-end restaurants are meant to keep the world at bay. They are meant to be a place where the real world does not intrude. And yet, every now and then it does, in all its glorious and random untidiness. At Jean-Georges in New York I once saw a waiter upend an entire shot glass of something white and creamy over a diner. Now I watched as a waiter took a spoon and fork and used them to chuck a piece of what was probably the most expensive lamb on the planet across the carpet.

But even that moment was upstaged by the arrival of my dessert, a classic rum baba, the sponge deep glazed and laid in a gold-plated bowl so the reflection of one against the other seemed to make the baba glow. A trolley laden with bottles was brought to the table. I was invited to taste any number of the twenty different rums to find the one I wished to have poured onto my dessert. I tasted just the two before choosing something with hints of vanilla from Venezuela. A jug of light whipped cream was placed before me, the one to be introduced to the other. I did as I was told and it was, of course, delightful, the light boozy sponge playing catch in my mouth with the chilled cream. It was the gastronomic equivalent of that moment at the end of the day when hot, tired feet touch cool, crisp linen bedsheets.

Even so, all I could think as I ate it, the only words that kept playing in my head were: “Blood glucose 5.9, blood glucose 5.9.” Even without the medical statistics, this sort of experience might be a cause for guilt, especially for a Jewish boy with a suspicion that his life had taken an unworthy turn; with the awful blood-sugar reading it was a psychodrama on a plate or, to be more literal, in a gold-plated bowl.

Afterward I stood outside on the ritzy Avenue Montaigne, queuing for a cab in the early autumn sunshine, and gave myself a talking-to. What was the point of doing this if I was only going to feel bad about it? How could a man whose job was the investigation of pleasure be so diffident about it, so uncertain, so unwilling to give himself to it? Or was it that sense of shame, that sense of badness, that made me enjoy it all the more? Or, to put it another way, just exactly how fucked up was I? Casually, more as a way to pass the time than anything else, I turned on my mobile phone.

There was one voice mail. It was from Sarah Burnett. The message crackled, as if she had called while on a train, but I could still make out what she was saying. There had been a mistake in the communication of some of the blood test results. The fax had got mangled, the digits muddled.

“Your blood glucose is actually 5.2 . . . which is fine. Nothing to worry about.” She said she was looking forward to seeing me in a week’s time and told me to enjoy myself in Paris. I grinned, closed my phone, and decided I should do as instructed.

It is a warm Saturday night, I am half cut on champagne, and I have just worked out the whole point of three-star restaurants. It is all about the peas. Not peas in general. Not just any peas. These peas, the ones in the bowl in front of me, here at Restaurant Guy Savoy by the Arc de Tri-omph. They are just so . . . so . . . damn pea-ish. This dish is the very essence of the pea, it is pea incarnate, a veritable hymn to the pea.

And to think I almost didn’t order it. Our waiter, Hubert, had made such a meal of selling the pea thing to us, I wanted to choose something else just to spite him. After all, how good could a pea get? It didn’t even have a pulse.

“Every pea in this pea salad is sliced in half,” Hubert said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Every pea.” Pause. “In half.”

Gosh, we said. In half. Fancy that.

“And do you know why they slice every pea in half?” We shook our heads, both now baffled and amazed that any man could be such an unself-conscious prick and yet still draw breath. He leaned closer into Maureen as if limbering up to put his hand down the front of her dress. Now he dropped his voice to an even more breathy whisper. “Double the pleasure,” he hissed, and gave a long slow nod as if to say: believe me. That’s some seriously hot pea action.

And blow me if he isn’t right. The all-important bisected peas lie around the outside of the bowl on top of a light, silky pea purée. Further into the bowl is a more coarse pea purée, and then something even
denser as though the flavor of pea has been reduced to its very essence. In the middle is a single poached egg. Once the plate has been put before us, our waiters each take a knife, make an incision in the white, and let the yolk flow out across the surrounding emerald sea.

I take one mouthful and suddenly I understand. The point of cooking at this level is to make every ingredient taste as much of itself as possible. It is to make you love the humblest of foodstuffs, even the pea. In most restaurants the cost of the ingredients of a dish should be 30 percent of its overall menu price. In this case there is no point making such calculations. The pea salad costs 47 euros, cheap for a restaurant at this level, but an awful lot of money for a handful of peas and an egg. Still, I have no doubt it is worth the expense.

When they bring us a bowl of artichoke soup, made with no butter or cream, but layered with slivers of the best Parmesan and black truffle, I decide Guy Savoy is a god, nothing more and certainly nothing less. This bowl of soup is an essay on the virtues of the artichoke, an illustrated lecture. I also believe these dishes provide an answer to the age-old question of whether cooking like this at its very highest level is an art or a craft. Encouraged by the booze, I argue that while great art should reflect on the human condition, true craftsmanship takes the natural world and presents it to us to its best advantage. By that standard, Savoy is a true master craftsman. I know some people regard the label craftsman as lesser than that of artist, but not me and not tonight. I don’t want a chef trying to tell me something about myself. I want him telling me stuff about peas and artichokes and I am delighted that this one has.

I am now terribly excited about the main course, veal roasted on the bone and served with truffled pommes purée. Sure, it’s 160 euros ($235) for two, which is the price of a reasonable hotel room for the night in this town. But we have done the pea thing and the artichoke thing, so we are up for it.

Which probably explains why the disappointment is so great, our
mood so low, when the meat arrives and it is dull and insipid, and the mash simply weird, with a strange gaseous back-taste rather than the earthy armpit pungency of truffles. Even the jus, the business end of a dish like this where all the fireworks should be, is nothing more than workmanlike. We plow through it all, morosely telling each other about better roast veal dishes we have eaten at restaurants in London for a quarter of the price. In just a few minutes Restaurant Guy Savoy has gone from being a gastronomic temple to being a gastronomic scout hut.

We know who to blame for all this because we can see him. At first when we were eating his pea salad and his artichoke soup, the sight of the gray-haired and bearded Guy Savoy striding about the chambers of his restaurant, shaking hands with his guests like his life depended upon it, was reassuring. But now that the meal has taken a dark turn, we are noticing things. We are noticing that he never actually seems to be anywhere except the dining room. He certainly doesn’t seem to be in the kitchen. We are noticing that his whites are spotless, as in snow-field white. Not a sauce splatter, not a mark. He looks like he has been as close to a stove as, well, I have.

Sure, he must have a terrific brigade of cooks in that kitchen of his. They did the peas and the artichokes, but now that I am disappointed by his 160 euro veal dish, I don’t care about them. I care about him and the fact he doesn’t appear to be cooking for me.

Later that evening, as we leave, muttering to each other about the way we have been done wrong, Guy Savoy is standing outside the restaurant on the step. I calculate that he is now literally as far as it is possible for him to be from his own kitchen, while still standing on part of the property. This makes me very cross indeed. Maureen, who has had more hot dinners in Paris three-stars than I’ve had hot dinners, suggests I may be overreacting. She tells me to go back to my hotel and get some sleep. I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow, she says. I have a lot of big days ahead of me, as it happens. I do hope the chefs of Paris are aware of this.

It is on the morning of the third day, a Sunday, that the scale of the sacrifice I am making hits me. I am wandering the huge outdoor market on boulevard Richard Lenoir, just off the Bastille, admiring the charcuterie stalls with their dense patés and fine, knobbly saucisson. There are stalls here dedicated to hot roast chickens and ducks, which are crisping up nicely in mobile rotisserie ovens and filling the air with their luscious, savory stench, and others laid with delicate pastries and cakes. It all looks beautiful but I know I can’t eat any of it, and I can’t eat any of it because I am simply not hungry.

This strikes me as a tragedy. I am in one of my favorite food cities in the world and the stuff I want to eat, the stuff I so love to eat, is not available to me. I think back to my fortieth birthday just a year before, when I had also chosen to come to Paris, though not to eat at any of the city’s three-star gastro-palaces. I had gone instead to L’Ami Louis, a legendary old-style Parisian bistro once frequented by Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, where I had eaten escargot followed by the best roast chicken in the world, accompanied by nothing more than a foot-high stack of thin rustling chips and a salad. There are many who regard L’Ami Louis as a tourist trap and it is true that it is usually full of people who aren’t French, but it still does its thing beautifully. The food is exactly as it should be, even if at a fearsome price, and that was what came to mind when I thought of Paris, but I couldn’t go there this time, nor to Bofinger, the uber-Parisian brasserie, where they serve oysters on the half shell and an impeccable choucroute.