Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (21 page)

That’s a fair criterion, right? Least you could ask of a meal—by classical standards, anyway.

To establish precedent, let’s take Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli in Spain—perhaps the longest and most famous of the tasting menus. After the full-on experience there—about five sustained hours of eating and drinking—I felt pretty good. I hung around drinking gin and tonics for another two hours—after which I could, I believe, have performed sexually and then happily gone out for a snack.

Le Bernardin in New York offers a “Chef ’s Tasting Menu” and I always feel fine after. Both meals are pretty carefully calibrated experiences. Laurent Gras’s L2O in Chicago, Andoni Aduriz’s Mugaritz in Saint Sebastian both take a modest and reasoned approach to the limits of the human appetite.

I mentioned chefs dreading tasting menus.

Consider the curse of Ferran Adrià. Not Ferran Adrià the chef, restaurateur, and creative artist. Ferran Adrià the diner—the “eater,” as he puts it. Ferran Adrià the frequent flyer. Doomed to walk this earth subjected to every jumped-up tasting menu, every wrongheaded venture in “molecular gastronomy” (a term he no longer uses), the interminable, well-intended ministrations of every admirer in every city and every country he may go. Imagine being Ferran Adrià. Food and wine festivals, chefs’ conferences, book tours, symposia. Everywhere he goes, there’s no getting out of it: he either gets dragged proudly to what his local handlers see as his kindred spirit—or he’s just
obliged
, when in Melbourne or Milwaukee or wherever, to pay homage to the local Big Dog, who’s famously worshipful of him. There’s no slipping in and out of town quietly without dissing somebody. He’s
got
to go.

One twenty-, thirty-course tasting menu after another, one earnest but half-baked imitator after another, wheeling out the tongue-scorching liquid nitrogen, the painfully imitative, long-discarded-by-Adrià foams, the clueless aping of Catalonian traditions they’ve probably never experienced firsthand.

And all the guy wants is a fucking burger.

Ferran Adrià walks into a bar…it’s like a joke, right? Only, I’m guessing, it’s no longer a joke to him. Because Ferran Adrià
can’t
walk into a bar—without six or seven freebie courses he never wanted showing up in front of him. When all he wanted was a burger.

Thomas Keller surely knows this pain. If the stories are true, when Keller goes out to dinner, an assistant calls ahead and explicitly orders the restaurant to
not
, under
any
circumstances, send any extra courses. There will be no unasked-for amuse-bouches. The chef does not want to see your interpretation of his signature “oysters and pearls.” He’s coming in for your chicken on a stick—which is quite good or he wouldn’t be coming—so please, leave the man alone.

You’re thinking, oh, the poor dears, great chefs all over the world wanting to stuff expensive ingredients in their faces…fuck
them
! But c’mon…Imagine, day after day, tired from long flights, one hotel bed after another, bleary-eyed, exhausted, craving nothing more complicated than Mom’s meatloaf, a simple roasted chicken—and here it comes,
another
three-hour extravaganza, usually a less good version of what you do for a living every day. It’s like being an overworked porn star and everywhere you go in your off-hours people are grabbing your dick and demanding a quickie.

Sitting here, wrestling with my reaction to last night’s meal at Per Se, I look back again; I search my memory for details from that greatest meal of my life at the French Laundry. There were me, Eric Ripert, Scott Bryan, and Michael Ruhlman. Twenty-two-some-odd courses—most of them different for each of us. God knows how many wines. A perfect, giddily excited five hours in wine country, thoughtfully punctuated by piss breaks. No one could have asked for more of a meal. Every plate seemed fresh and new—not just the ingredients, but the concepts behind them as well. It was a magical evening filled with many magical little moments. Those memories come back first:

The silly expressions on all our faces at the arrival of the famous cones of salmon tartare—how the presentation “worked” exactly as it was supposed to. Even on the chefs and on Ruhlman, Keller’s coauthor on the cookbook.

The surprise course of “Marlboro-infused coffee custard with pan-seared foie gras,” a dish designed specifically for me—at the time still a three-pack-a-day smoker—an acknowledgment that I was probably tweaking for a butt around that time.

The “oysters and pearls” dish—how thrilled I was to finally taste what I’d only gaped at previously in the lush pages of The Book. How they did not disappoint—if anything, only exceeded expectations. The way the waiter’s hands trembled and shook as he shaved a gigantic black truffle over our pasta courses. How he dropped it—and how, with a look, we all agreed not to tell.

The four of us, during another break before dessert, drunk and whispering like kids on Halloween in the Laundry’s rear garden as we snuck up to the kitchen window and spied enviously on Keller and his crew.

After-dinner drinks in the garden with the chef. Dark by now—and very late, the restaurant closing down. The way Keller seemed to vibrate at another, slower, deeper pitch than every other chef I’d met. He seemed a happy yet still restless man, sitting there, surrounded by growing things, the place he’d built. I asked the famously workaholic chef if he’d ever consider taking time off—just doing nothing for a month—and he reacted as if I’d asked the question in Urdu, tilting his head and trying to make out what I possibly could have meant. I remember pulling away in our ridiculous rented prom limousine, knowing that I had had the best meal of my life.

But I remember now another detail, something I’d forced from my memory as inconvenient. That didn’t fit in the picture I was painting for myself—of an idyllic five hours in wine country, a timelessly magnificent meal prepared by a chef I idolized.

I push myself to remember what came
after
—what happened after we pulled away in our silly white stretch. There was little revelry in the back of that car. I remember moaning and heavy breathing. A struggle to hold on.

We willingly and enthusiastically ate and drank too much—this is clear. But this, I’d argue, is what is expected when you order the grand tasting at the Laundry or at Per Se. That you will—or should, if you’re sensible—prepare yourself in advance: maybe fast for a day. Wake up early the morning of your dinner and stretch your stomach with water. And the following day must be planned for as well. There will—there
must
—be a period of recovery.

Is there something fundamentally, ethically…
wrong
about a meal so Pantagruelian in its ambition and proportions? Other than the “people are starving in Africa” argument, and the “250,000 people lost their jobs in America last month alone” argument, there’s the fact that they must necessarily trim off about 80 percent of the fish or bird to serve that perfectly oblong little nugget of deliciousness on the plate. There’s the unavoidable observation that it’s simply more food and alcohol than the human body is designed to handle. That you will, after even the best of times, the most wonderful of such meals,
need
to flop onto your bed, stomach roiling with reflux, the beginnings of a truly awful hangover forming in your skull, farting and belching like a medieval friar.

Is this the appropriate end, the inevitable result of genius? Of an otherwise sublime experience?

Must it end like this?

And should it end like this? Struggling mightily to not spray truffle-flecked chunks into the toilet?

No one expects that anyone would eat like this every other day—or even every other month. But even as a once-a-year thing…shouldn’t how you feel afterward be a consideration?

I should point out that there is a perfectly reasonable
nine-course
option. We chose to be gluttonous. But when you’re fortunate enough to be at Per Se or at the French Laundry, you just don’t want to miss anything. You eat way past the point of hitting the wall. Or I do, anyway.

Last night, the early evening light appeared, to my jaundiced eye, unkind to Per Se. This was not a good way for me to start the meal. A dining room is a stage set, an elaborate illusion, a magician’s trick contained between four walls. Per Se’s dining room is one of the most meticulously constructed and most beautiful such spaces in New York. It looks out over Columbus Circle and Central Park. There is a wide “breezeway” of unused space between the kitchen and dining room, a luxuriously empty zone designed to serve as a peaceful, quieting transitional area where servers can have a few extra seconds to make the transition from kitchen reality to dining-room reality.

If cooking professionally is about control, eating successfully should be about submission, about easily and without thinking giving yourself over to whatever dream they’d like you to share. In the best-case scenario, you shouldn’t be intellectualizing what you’re eating while you’re eating it. You shouldn’t be noticing things at all. You should be pleasingly oblivious to the movements of the servers in the dining area and bus stations, only dimly aware of the passage of time. Taking pictures of your food as it arrives—or, worse, jotting down brief descriptions for your blog entry later—is missing the point entirely. You shouldn’t be forced to think at all. Only feel.

I was noticing things. Which is bad. Before darkness fell, bathing everything in sleek, sophisticated obscurity, the servers’ uniforms looked a little sad. Shiny in spots, and old. They looked like…waiters instead of the ambassadors of culinary Olympus I’d always thought of them as. A wall-mounted table at a waiter station drooped ever so slightly at an angle uneven with the floor. The wood trim on the furniture was almost imperceptibly but nonetheless visibly patchy, and the roses on the table the tiniest bit old, their petals starting to go at the edges. For one of two of the most notoriously perfect dining rooms in America, this was shocking. I felt sad and depressed and deeply ashamed of myself for noticing.

And maybe I was detecting a sadness, too, in the voices of the servers. Jonathan Benno, the executive chef, had announced a few weeks earlier that he would be leaving, and maybe I was only imagining it, but the exuberance, the top-of-the-world pride and confidence I encountered at the French Laundry and at previous meals at Per Se seemed lacking that night, replaced by something else.

There were goujons. Two tiny little cheese-filled pillows.

And the famous cones of salmon tartare. Just as pretty and just as delicious as ever. But kind of like an old girlfriend by now. The thrill was gone. No word is as dead as “tartare” these days, and I found myself wondering how chef Benno really felt about the things; whether those cones, once objects of child-like wonder to even burned-out fucks like me, were now prison bars of a sort—too beloved, too famous, too expected to ever be removed or replaced by any chef.

I had a pretty weak summer vegetable gazpacho, but my wife’s sweet carrot velouté was bright and clean, hinting of tarragon and anise.

I got the French Laundry classic, “oysters and pearls,” one of Keller’s most well-known and admired creations from back in the day: a sabayon of “pearls” of tapioca with oysters and caviar. The servers absolutely lavished it with caviar at tableside. If it is possible to put too much caviar on a dish, it happened here. It seemed…disrespectful of the old girl to dress her up that much. I admit to actually tearing up when this dish was put down in front of me. Even then, early in the meal, I had this inexplicable sense that I might never see her again. Here was a true modern American classic—and a personal favorite, one I was really sentimental about. I felt I shared personal history with her—all the things you’d want your guest to feel about their food. But I was dismayed by the profligacy with which my server ladled on the caviar. It felt like they were saying, “We don’t trust the bitch to go out like that anymore, we got to put on some more lipstick”—and I was offended for her.

Day-boat scallop sashimi with cauliflower fleurettes, sweet carrots, and pea shoots was flawless, impeccable—and everybody else is doing it, or something like it, these days.

Marinated Atlantic squid with squash-blossom tempura and squash-blossom pesto was vibrant and new—and quickly, it was good to be alive again.

A white-truffle-oil-infused custard with a “ragout” of black winter truffles was over the top in a good way, a happy tweak of an old favorite from The Book, joyously excessive rather than insecure about itself. It was rich, wintery, and pounded its flavor home without apology. My wife’s coddled egg with
“beurre noisette”
and toasted brioche was even better, too rich, too good, and too much—in the best possible ways.

But it was the next course—a homemade “mortadella” with turnip greens and violet artichokes and mustard for me, and a
“coppa di testa,”
made with guanciale with cucumber and ravigote for my wife—that was the first truly thrilling moment of the meal. These were refined but still relatively austere versions of everyday Italian country staples, flavors relatively rough and forward—and it felt like the first time I’d tasted salted food all day. I found myself hoping that this was the direction of the remainder of the meal. This, I thought, was good. This…was great.

I was brought rudely back to earth by the smoke-filled glass domes approaching our table. An otherwise wonderful “corned” veal tongue in one and a hunk of pork belly in the other, ruined by a completely unnecessary impulse to dazzle. They’d used those little smoke guns that no chefs seem able to keep their hands off these days, to pump the smoke into the specially custom-made, hand-blown glass vessels, and they shouldn’t have bothered. The veal tongue managed to shrug the smoke off with little negative effect—but it totally fucked up the pork belly. It pissed me off—a gimmick.