Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh Read online

  F ork It Over

  The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater A L A N R I C H M A N

  For my wife, Lettie Teague,

  and the man we both loved, Art Cooper

  Contents

  A M U S E - B O U C H E

  The Eating Life / 3

  A P P E T I Z E R S

  A Mother’s Knishes / 17

  What a Dive! / 29

  Hungry in the Hamptons / 35

  The Saucier’s Apprentice / 45

  Bocuse Must Go / 53

  A Room of One’s Own / 57

  Palate Cleanser

  Ten Commandments for Diners / 63

  E N T R E E S

  Too Much Is Never Enough / 69

  Play It Again, Lam / 83

  Miami Weiss / 99

  The Long Aloha / 105

  Not Much of a Man in Havana / 113

  Toro! Toro! Toro! / 125

  “As Long as There’s a Moishe’s, There’ll Always Be a Montreal” / 135

  Slicing Up Naples / 153

  Waiter, There’s a Foot in My Soup / 165

  The Fruits of Islam / 177

  Oldest Living Jewish Waiters Tell All / 191

  Pete Jones Is a Man Among Pigs / 209

  Alice Doesn’t Cook Here Anymore / 225

  Palate Cleanser

  Ten Commandments for Restaurants / 237

  S I D E S

  My Beef with Vegans / 243

  Sheep Thrills / 253

  Are We Having Fungus Yet? / 259

  C H E E S E

  Don’t Say “Cheese” / 273

  Dairy Queens / 277

  Palate Cleanser

  Ten Reasons Why White Wine Is Better than Red / 285

  W I N E

  Nose Job / 289

  Great Expectorations / 295

  $25,000 Wine Week: A Tale of Excess / 301

  G R A T U I T Y

  “Please, Please, More!” Gasped Sharon Stone / 311

  Acknowledgments / 321

  About the Author

  Praise

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A M U S E - B O U C H E

  T H E E A T I N G L I F E

  I am a restaurant critic. I eat for a living.

  Chefs complain about people like me. They argue that we are not qualified to do our jobs because we do not know how to cook. I tell them I’m not entirely pleased with the way they do their jobs, either, because they do not know how to eat. I have visited most of the best restaurants of the world, and they have not. I believe I know how to eat as well as any man alive.

  I dine out constantly, but there is a great deal I do in restaurants that people who eat purely for pleasure would not consider part of a normal meal. You would not enjoy having dinner with me.

  I lie—make a reservation under a false name. I steal—the menu, not the silverware. I wander. I am always getting up from my table in order to check out my surroundings. I drift around, and the meander-ing invariably ends when a well-meaning captain taps me on the shoulder and points me in the direction of the men’s room, wrongly assuming that is where I wish to go. I rarely talk to the people dining with me, but I love to chat with waiters and busboys. They know the secrets lurking behind the swinging kitchen doors.

  Friends who accompany me to meals are bored by the absence of conversation. They are unhappy with the dishes I choose for them—

  they have their hearts set on a lovely salad of poached Maine lobster and become cranky when I tell them they must sample the seared calf ’s brain. The warm mandarin soufflé they’ve been anticipating all evening 4

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  is finally set before them, and I stick my spoon in it before they have a taste.

  Yet everybody envies what I do. They think it’s the gastronomic counterpart of test-driving Mercedes sports coupes or helping Las Vegas chorus girls dress. They believe it involves little more than eating unceasingly and being reimbursed for the privilege. There’s some truth to that, but sometimes I am obligated to eat three full meals a day, day after day, which is not always easy, even on an expense account. I generally receive little sympathy when I make that point.

  A critic has to understand when food is correct, which is to be admired, and when it is inspired, which we would call a miracle. The job is part analysis (Is this good?), part self-analysis (It’s good, but am I the only person who likes it?), and part gluttony (Have I tried everything on the menu?).

  I’ve never been a victim of culinary fatigue, because I can reverse direction and concentrate on the humble whenever I weary of the haute. A natural-casing hot dog off the grill can be as thrilling as Charlie Trotter’s terrine of asparagus with goat cheese, beet juice, and hundred-year-old balsamic vinegar.

  I often make that point when it’s my turn to pay.

  I knew I had found my calling one day in the mid-fifties when I was having lunch with my mother at the Chuckwagon, in our little Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park. She told me I should have the pastrami instead of corned beef.

  My streak was over. For years, my standard lunch had been hot corned beef on seeded rye with a cream soda. This was before animal fats were considered fattening. (The milkman usually dropped off

  “extra rich” milk at our house.) I so liked corned beef that I hadn’t come up with a compelling reason to gamble on anything else. I considered myself set for life.

  I expected nothing to come of this unsolicited pastrami sandwich, but the first bite was so profound I recall the moment the way others would remember a first date—years away in my case. I see myself at one F O R K I T O V E R

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  of the Chuckwagon’s lacquered tables, my mother seated to my left and intensely alert. She was like a mother robin watching her young swallowing worms. All was still. When I tasted the fatty-smoky-tender meatiness, I realized that I would never again have to accept the mundane.

  All else was forgotten, even the unobtainable Olivia Biggs, a pig-tailed skinny blonde I worshiped, aware that she accepted me as an occasional partner at Friday-night dances only because I came with a Pez dispenser and shamelessly doled out all the candy she desired.

  The pastrami taught me to understand life’s infinite possibilities.

  Eating was no longer a mildly pleasurable undertaking that peaked with a five-cent box of nonpareils or a six-cent cherry Coke. Although I would not embrace eating as a profession for decades (and never touched Olivia Biggs), I sensed that food offered delights that could not be equaled, not even by the attractions found in the pages of the Playboy magazines I accidentally flipped open while perusing comic books at the drugstore.

  Despite its seminal gastronomic importance in my life, I was never that enchanted by the Chuckwagon, only by the pastrami. My first meaningful restaurant experience occurred a few months later, on a family trip across the country. As we drove through downtown Chicago, my father pointed to a sign and said, “We’ll eat there.” I remember the lure, a steak dinner for $1.09, spelled out in neon.

  The restaurant was Tad’s, the brand-new flagship of a future national chain. There I learned that dining out represented an entirely different experience from dinner at home. My mother’s consistently excellent recipes offered whatever a guest at her table might desire, except for the unexpected. She could cook, but she could not surprise.

  I had eaten full-course dinners in restaurants before, but my parents tended to take my sister and me to places that mimicked my mother’s cooking, whereas Tad’s offered mysterious forms of nouri
shment—fatty steaks reeking with charred goodness, baked potatoes as big as footballs, an unhealthy breadstuff of indescribable appeal. We were there because it was inexpensive and, I’m sure, because we had come to stockyards territory and my parents believed my sister and I 6

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  would benefit from sampling the local bounty. They practiced straightforward parenting and intended to teach us that the beef in Chicago was tops because there was so much of it around. (For a similar reason, my mother joined the Catholics in broiling fish on Friday nights.) Tad’s had a cafeteria line, the better to save on tips. The steak was thin and tough, but it had a quality I can best describe as not-my-mother’s-cooking, the flavor of an open fire in an untamed land. It was black and gritty and delicious, the piquancy of an unfamiliar culture. I believe I shivered at the unfamiliarity of Tad’s greasy sirloin—the basic steak that was the centerpiece of the $1.09 special. My family didn’t do upgrades.

  I subsequently learned that the charcoal fire wasn’t real. It was made with tiles painted to resemble glowing embers, a breakthrough by the Tad’s scientific staff. I couldn’t have been more convinced it was charcoal had I carried in the Kingsford myself. The overly thick slice of bread, painted with an oily product and laid grease-side down on the grill, provided a mouthwatering succulence I would later find duplicated only in seared foie gras. Finally, there was the potato. Such tubers were unavailable at the A&P where I often shopped with my mother.

  The potatoes we ate at home were tiny and immaterial, but the Tad’s spud was buttery and vaguely nutty, a combination I don’t recall encountering again, even on one of my infrequent visits to Idaho. We carried our trays to a back room done up in some sort of bawdy red velveteen that I figured had to cost a million dollars. I felt like Marshal Matt Dillon, sitting loose and ready in the Long Branch Saloon, waiting for Miss Kitty to sashay in.

  Years passed, but my taste in food remained the same. When it came time for college, I stayed close to home, attending the University of Pennsylvania, where I traded in my mother’s healthful cooking for Pop’s, a one-man campus dump owned and operated by a gnomish reprobate with black fingernails, a fat cigar stub in his mouth, and a filthy meat-slicing machine. His fifty-cent, five-inch-thick delicatessen sandwiches were so savory I frequently cut chemistry lab to get to F O R K I T O V E R

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  the front of the line, which might have led to my taking an incomplete in the course. When I wasn’t at Pop’s, I’d generally dine on broasted chicken, a newly invented method of poultry cooking that combined, as the name implies, broiling and roasting. The chicken pieces that emerged from the broaster were simultaneously crunchy and soggy.

  Philadelphia in the sixties was still a decade away from the dining revolution that would make it, all too briefly, the most creative restaurant city in America. The only remaining reliable food was the renowned cheese steak, best when consumed at three a.m. Cheese steaks possess minimal nutritional value, but they are useful as a remedy for hangovers, particularly those that blossom following a long night quaffing Philadelphia’s very own Schmidt’s beer.

  College was followed, as was relatively routine in the pre-protest sixties, by the army. I realize that the youth of today view time in the military and time in a penitentiary as essentially the same experience, but the only aspect of the military I found as dreadful as commonly believed was mess-hall food. I also learned, during my overseas assignments, that the excellence of a country’s cuisine tends to vary in inverse proportion to the number of uniformed men stationed there. In other words, I did not eat excellently in either of the countries I invaded, the Dominican Republic and, later, Vietnam.

  I committed, to my knowledge, only one war crime. That occurred near San Isidro Airfield, outside Santo Domingo. I was a willing partic-ipant in the theft, slaughter, and roasting of a goat that had strayed from its home. Several of us, crazed from months of military rations, constructed a great pyre and blistered the innocent beast. We did not escape justice, because all of us who consumed the meat became deathly sick.

  Even today, when I am in a restaurant and the waiter proudly announces that the special is goat, I am visited by queasy flashbacks to the bonfire of shame in the field behind the macadam-paved strip where the Dominican Republic Air Force parked its World War II–era P-51 Mustangs.

  I ate badly in Vietnam, too, although I did gain considerable weight from the huge bowls of strawberry ice cream I’d plunder from the mess hall every afternoon. It was so hot the ice cream boiled in the bowl as 8

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  it passed from a solid to a gaseous state without ever becoming a liquid, a phenomenon I was able to identify as sublimation from my ineffectual tenure as a chemistry major.

  I had come home from Vietnam and was working on the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin when a colleague taught me an invaluable lesson: how to lunch in style. She was Leslie Bennetts, then a feature writer for the paper and now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. When I was leaving to take a job as the sports columnist for the Montreal Star, Leslie invited me to a good-bye lunch, a gesture of generosity she appeared to regret when I recently reminded her of it. I phoned to tell her the meal had meant a great deal to me, and she replied, “I treated you to lunch? Why did I do that? Are you sure this is true?” Then she laughed, rather unkindly.

  She went on to explain how little she liked me in those years, because I was alleged to have referred to her as stuck-up when she arrived in Philadelphia from New York. It was probably true, because we Philadelphians assumed all New Yorkers were that way. Leslie seemed to confirm this assessment when she said, “Certainly I was more sophisticated than you. I came from New York and went out with older men.”

  I recall the restaurant as small and extremely French. I ordered chicken tarragon, new to me. I drank white wine with it, and though this wasn’t my first drink, I’d never sipped wine in broad daylight sitting alongside a tall blonde of overweening New York sophistication. I perspired heavily throughout the meal, but that might have had less to do with Leslie’s attractiveness than with the all-rayon shirt under my all-polyester blazer, a Stanley Blacker double-knit in chocolate brown with gold buttons.

  Leslie, who claimed to have remembered nothing about our lunch, added, unnecessarily, “I never let men pay for me, but I don’t know why I would have paid for you.” She said what she remembered of my dining habits is that occasionally my mother would stop by the Bulletin offices to drop off brown-bag lunches. “And one rainy day,” she cruelly noted, “she brought galoshes in for you.” F O R K I T O V E R

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  I didn’t become a full-time restaurant critic until the start of the nineties.

  I dabbled in reviewing before then, treating it more like a hobby than a calling. While I was a sportswriter in Boston, the Globe sent me off to find the best Peking duck in the city, and I managed to turn that into a sideline lasting nearly a year. While I was the sports columnist for the Montreal Star, I was made the co-restaurant critic under a pseudonym. That part-time position provided me with dinners for more than a year. My motivation for doing both assignments was simple: the glorious prospect of free food. I was paid hardly anything extra, which is where I got the idea that I couldn’t actually make a living being a restaurant critic. Critics got fat, I thought, but they didn’t get rich.

  I was hired by Gentlemen’s Quarterly in 1989 to do profiles, but I still dabbled in comestibles. I was writing a monthly wine column for GQ when the editor-in-chief, Art Cooper, asked me if I wouldn’t mind turning it into a food column. That was my big break: becoming a food writer who was paid like a profile writer. I had the best job in the entire field of criticism: restaurant reviewer. With all due respect to art, film, and theater critics, I’ve always believed their work was less fundamental than mine. Food is life. The rest is parsley.

  I was well-prepared for the job. I’d eaten my way through all the importa
nt American food trends. The majority of them occurred from 1975 into the early nineties, exactly when I was traveling around the country the most. I got to forty-four states, a pretty extensive overview.

  I even ate at the Safari Grill in Manhattan, where the cooks wore pith helmets. I didn’t miss a lot.

  Much that I’ve experienced has come and gone, but a few trends have gripped our culture and cannot be shaken loose—Perrier water, domestic goat cheese, comfort food, celebrity chefs, free-range chicken, farm-raised game, baby vegetables, microbreweries, recitations of specials, vertical presentations, tapas, raw fish, olive oil, arugula, cilantro, white truffles, molten chocolate cakes, reconfirming reservations, wild greens, power breakfasts, menus dégustations, fresh ground pepper, 1 0

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  sun-dried tomatoes, and undercooking. I remember telling Fabio Picchi, chef-owner of Cibrèo in Florence, that Americans were demanding their food barely warmed, and he replied, “Yes, I know this problem.” Not all food trends stuck. Basically gone are oat-bran bagels, edible flowers, white eggplant, mesquite grilling, cold pasta (or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part), dry beer, blue-corn chips, cuttlefish ink, wine coolers, blackened fish, mung beans, and nouvelle cuisine. Southwestern cuisine has almost disappeared (except in the Southwest), whereas French bistros come and go.

  Great chefs do not. To me, the most consequential chef working in an American kitchen in the past quarter-century was not James Beard, André Soltner, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Bouley, Nobu Matsuhisa, or even the late Jean-Louis Palladin, who prepared classic French food in this country better than anybody else. (Julia Child was certainly monumental, but she wasn’t a chef.) Rather, I favor the late Gilbert Le Coze, whom I met in the eighties, when he and his sister, Maguy, opened their French seafood restaurant Le Bernardin in New York. Much of what we know about serving fish in fine restaurants we learned from Le Coze. Had he not arrived, we might still be eating frozen scrod.