THENASTYBITS (8 page)

SALTY

Adria's El Bulli, on the Costa Brava, they do have to pass through the rest of Spain to get there. Many return dazzled by the casual Spanish approach to eating: dinner at midnight, the standup snacks at crowded tapas bars, the whole concept of the
poteo
—the multistop bar and food crawl from casual eatery to casual eatery, grazing for what's good, cherry-picking the best at each place ("a little bit, often") before moving on to the next place, and the next. The tiny-bite
pinchos
and unself-conscious approach to the very best ingredients come as both relief and revelation to the jaded chef on vacation. All those nonsensical, show-business aspects of "our thing" seem ever more burdensome, and extraneous, upon return.

And then there's sushi, and the sushi bar. To say that chefs have always been well disposed toward sushi and sashimi would be an understatement. No single development in Western gastronomy has changed our lives as drastically or as well as that first moment when Americans and English-speaking restaurantgoers decided they could let go of their instinctive wariness of raw fish—that sashimi and sushi were cool and desirable and worth paying for. From a marketing standpoint, the spread of sushi lifted all boats for all chefs. Now that there was always a Japanese chef willing to pay twice the going rate for quality seafood, standards shot through the roof. And more importantly, the choices of ingredients we could reliably expect to sell our customers expanded. Customers willing to eat eel, sea urchin, belly tuna, and monkfish liver meant that French and Italian and American chefs could now offer the neglected, nearly forgotten traditional items once almost impossible to sneak onto our menus; we were now free to serve the oily, bony, squiggly, and delicious delights like octopus, mackerel, rouget, and fresh sardines that we had always loved—and that had always been essential parts of our various "mother" cuisines.

Just as importantly, chefs liked to eat sushi. It was a flavor spectrum markedly different from what we were elbow deep in all our working days. Freshness and quality were immediately

COUNTER
CULTURE

apparent—just look in the display—and gratifyingly devoid of disguise or extravagant technique. And after a long day dealing with waiters and floor staff, chefs could avoid further contact entirely, ordering the good stuff directly from the sushi chef. Raw fish also gave us a nice, clean, healthy protein buzz that went well with all the liquor we'd likely been swilling and made us feel better about the ravages of our various lifestyle choices.

Over the years, chefs have accumulated many happy experiences at counters. We liked them. We wished we could have one for ourselves. Maybe the earliest, loudest shot across the bow— and the one that caused the widest ripples—was the opening of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris. Robuchon, of course, is one of the very best chefs on the planet, one of the French masters, and L'Atelier was, then, a radical departure. The elegant but casual space in Saint-Germain is almost entirely kitchen, with counter space and seats snaking at angles around its perimeters. Black-clad counter "help" act as combination server-somme-liers, clearing and setting, suggesting and pouring wines, and chatting informally with customers, as one would expect at a favorite diner. The precisely plated and delicious food would be perfectly at home in the dining room of a traditional three-star restaurant, but in fact benefits from the more comfortable ambiance. I recently sat alone and had a nine-course menu
decouverte
and never felt the awkwardness of the solitary diner. The servers were friendly and talkative, and the usually jaded, seen-it-all Parisians on both sides and across from me were positively effervescing with pleasure, as if recently released from prison. Eating jewel-like fare such as
La Langoustine dans un ravioli truffe au choux vert, Le Cepe en creme legere sur un oeuf cocotte au persil plat,
and
Cochon de lait en cotelettes dories
(accompanied by Robuchon's ethereal yet butter-loaded mashed potatoes)—even an ironic tribute to the classic
Le Riz rond—
was a joy. Gone was the stodginess, the ceremony, the invisible straitjacket that usually accompanies a meal like this. Customers felt free to tear at bread from the baskets placed above them on

the sushi-style display case and mop sauce with abandon. It felt liberating. I left feeling as if I'd seen the future. (Or at least very much hoping I had.)

I've been a fan of Paul Kahan's Blackbird in Chicago for years. Unlike some of the Second City's other practitioners, the place never seemed full of itself, as much a bar with surprisingly good food as a destination restaurant. With the opening of Avec next door, however, Kahan and his chef de cuisine Koren Grieveson moved into even more customer-friendly territory. The long, honey-colored cedar-walled room holds five communal tables and a long wine bar designed to encourage a "convivial atmosphere." Avec intends (as its name implies) that its impressive collection of wine be "best enjoyed
with
food,
with
friends,
with
company." From a wood-burning oven and single stovetop just across the long counter, an astonishingly good assortment of house-made salamis, artisan cheeses, and large and small plates like slow-roasted pork shoulder, smoked quail, lamb brochette, and whole roasted fish are slapped down by energetic and spectacularly knowledgeable servers who seem positively exuberant in their detailed descriptions of wine, cheese, and cured meat options. It's a great meal—and again,
fun.
As at L'Atelier, you look around and see people smiling, actually talking to each other, nicking food off each other's plates, and having what has been missing from so many moribund and pretentious dining rooms: a good time.

There was a "well, what were you waiting for" feel when Mario Batali and his chef Andy Nusser opened Casa Mono in New York. By now, it seemed entirely right that we needed a place to eat perfectly wonderful small plates of Spanish-style tripes and cockscombs, blood pudding, and cured hams at a bare lunch counter. Great ingredients done right, by cooks standing a few inches away. Order a lot and dig in. That Mario himself is often to be seen happily picking from plates with his fingers sets an inspiring tone.

But the boldest, wackiest, most reactionary of the defectors to casual counter-style services has to be Montreal's enfant terrible, Martin Picard. At the crowded, chaotic, and giddily retro Au Pied de Cochon, he's stood everything on its head. The one-time chef of the city's "best restaurant," the more twee and traditional "big plate/little serving/cappuccino of whatever" Toque, Picard broke entirely from his precious, haute roots and opened a rude, crude, over-the-top fabulous ode to excess, specializing in insanely mammoth portions of Quebe-cois sugar-shack-style indulgence. You know from the very beginning what you are in for: Bar snacks are
oreilles de crisses,
ear-shaped tidbits of fried pork rind. Picard himself, usually unshaven—looking more lumberjack than chef—is to be found, usually in food-stained T-shirt, presiding over the madness by a roaring wood-burning oven. Dino-sized plates of pot-au-feu (a whole game bird, four marrow bones, stacked with
boudin noir
and foie gras), cassoulet, pig's-foot stew, duck "in the can" (a half duck breast, foie gras, and cabbage, slow cooked in a can and poured over a crouton topped with celeriac puree), and
pontine
—the Picard version of the classic Quebec guilty-pleasure fave of
frites
drowning in demi-glace and cheese curds, topped with a thick slab of melting foie gras—all are prepared in front of you by Picard's fellow transgressors, a crew of T-shirted and funny-hat-wearing cooks with similarly impressive resumes. There are a few tables, stuffed between wall and counter, but the fun is to be had watching the dedicated but underdressed cooks in the crowded, nearly unworkable-looking open kitchen, gleefully lopping slabs of foie and throwing them around like cheap shortening. The signature dish of stuffed pig's trotters is exactly that: two enormous pig's feet, absolutely jammed with foie gras and sauced with a rich onion cream sauce.

It's too much. It's too loud. The kitchen looks like a train wreck. The portions are crippling. You won't want to think about foie gras for weeks after eating there. And it's an absolute joy to experience. Everyone—from customers, to cooks, to service staff, to the chef—seems happy to be there. The cooks will tell you so themselves, as they race to fill orders from postage-stamp-size work spaces, elbowing each other to get at one of the endlessly refilled crocks of mashed potatoes. There's no "attitude." It's about food—and company—and the enjoyment of both. It may well be the antidote to every other restaurant in North America.

A
LIFE
OF
CRIME

''''Why didn't you give him a beatin' then?" "Well, 'cause . . . uh . . ."

"I told ya. Forget this other shit. Give him a fuckin' beatin'." "Well, the uh . . . I was waiting to hear from you."
"J
told you yesterday . . . What are you, Chinese? Hit him. This guy's nobody, and
if
he's somebody, I don't give a fuck."

—John Gotti, former Gambino crime family boss, discussing debt restructuring with an associate

i love reading about
crime. I like
writing
about crime. I like listening to wiretap recordings of gangsters, hearing the marve-lously loopy, repetitive, elliptical, and wildly profane patois of two semiarticulate career criminals who think they just
might
be being recorded by the FBI, but have business to conduct anyway. It's poetry to me.

In my apartment, CourtTV, the twenty-four-hour criminal justice cable network, is always on; the sounds of badly miked witnesses, recorded emergency calls, droning coroners, and preening lawyers are the background music to my leisure hours. While I sip my morning coffee in bed, friends are betraying friends on the stand, pathologists coldly recite the particulars of damage to bones and tissue, stone killers affectlessly describe the circumstances leading up to murder, dismemberment, arson . . . and worse. Lawyers aggressively examine and cross-examine, shrieking with feigned outrage, while outside my windows, car alarms whoop and wail—the occasional urban percussion of shattering safety glass when yet another young entrepreneur makes off with a car stereo. It's like jazz to me, and I miss it when I'm away. The familiar criminal sounds are almost comforting.

A lot of crime buffs favor the lone sociopath, the serial killer, the pathological narcissist. They like maladjusted teens who listen to Metallica, shave their heads, and then go on killing sprees, or former bed wetters who kill their mothers, then describe how they could still hear Mom's voice, chastising them as they flushed her vocal cords down the food disposal. They thrive on the special little moments in criminal trials when, for instance, the best friend of this month's latest juvenile mass-murderer balks at admitting on the stand that he saw his buddy cry—this just after cheerfully implicating him in the slaughter of ten of his classmates:

Lawyer:
So, after emptying his weapon, am I to understand that Mr. Sprewell adorned his person with the blood
of
his victims? Is that correct}

Witness:
Huh?

Lawyer:
His face . . . he put blood on his face after killing them?

Witness:
Oh, yeah. He, like smeared blood on his cheeks . . . like an Indian, you know? Stripes like. He said it looked cool.

Lawyer:
And later. . . after you say you both went back to the defendant's home to play video games and kill his parents . . . did the defendant at any point cry?

Witness:
Cry? I don't know . . . I don't know
if
he like . . . cried. He was . . . you know . . . upset.

Me? I'm bored by the lone nut and the sexual psychopath. I don't care to what degree Metallica recordings played a role in young Timmy's transition from honor student to thrill killer. I don't care "who dunnit"
...
or even "why he dunnit," and my tastes in crime fiction reflect that attitude: I'm interested in