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

Le Coze loved working in America, except for one peculiarity. He would stand by the front door of his restaurant, immaculate in chef ’s whites, greeting customers as they arrived, and they would respond to his welcome by asking, “Where’s the bathroom?” It drove him to distraction. He could not understand why Americans needed to go to the bathroom the moment they arrived at a restaurant, because the French were taught as children to go before they went out.

  The fish at a dazzling restaurant like Le Bernardin was irreproachable, but I remember being just as excited by the seafood at Margaret Tayar, little more than a ruin of a bar located behind a beachfront parking lot in Tel Aviv. The experiences I’ve had eating unlikely food in distant spots are among my most vivid memories.

  Margaret Tayar, the owner, made a fish burger so profound I cannot help but banish those made with beef to afterthoughts. It was preF O R K I T O V E R

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  pared from loup de mer and grilled very rare. She told me all her fish was caught by a man of about seventy who had fished since he was ten but had not learned to swim. Six times he had fallen into the sea and six times the sea had carried him ashore, but ultimately, he told her, it would not.

  In the Republic of Djibouti, an African country so hot that food practically cooks itself, I ate a memorable lunch at the commando training center for French Foreign Legion troops. The meal began with a seven-pound lobster harvested by a Schwarzenegger-sized soldier with a terrible scar on his left arm that looked as though it had been inflicted in close combat. He swore it was a burn scar from when he was eighteen months old. Five of us ate the lobster cold, in chunks, dipped in mayonnaise from a jar. The entree was a spicy, gorgeously rich veal stew with tiny macaroni prepared by a native Djiboutian cook who wore a souvenir Philadelphia T-shirt. On that visit, I learned how to construct a homemade mine out of plastique and a dinner plate, making me potentially the most deadly food writer of all time.

  I don’t cook, but I never cease thinking about kitchens. To me the home kitchen is a place of sweetness and sentiment, of a mother’s apron scented with onions and powdered with flour. The restaurant kitchen is even more magical. There stands the great chef, wearing his dress whites, as majestic as a naval commander on the quarterdeck of his ship-of-war. As much as I admire kitchens, I spend as little time as possible in them. I have been known to stand in front of my microwave, reheating coffee, wondering why it takes so long.

  Once, and only once, have I triumphed in the kitchen. I cooked dinner for Claudette Colbert, Academy Award winner for Best Actress in 1935. I haven’t done much in my life a lot better than that.

  She was in her eighties. I was in my forties. I had been sent by a magazine to Perth, Australia, to interview her while she was appearing in a play with Rex Harrison. Colbert did not invite him to dine with us, and I got the impression that however charming Harrison appeared onstage, he was not so appealing after hours.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  Colbert was staying in a hotel suite, and her maid (and cook) was in an adjoining suite equipped with a small kitchen. Each morning Colbert went shopping for groceries, usually fish and vegetables, the two items I prepare the most inadequately when I am forced by circumstances to make food. As we were leaving the market one day, she smiled in her mischievous way—if you’ve seen her films, you know that look—and announced I would be manning the stove that night.

  I really dislike standing in front of stoves. I find them uncomfortably hot.

  Her maid, thank goodness, had cookbooks, and she watched skeptically as I desperately scoured them, seeking a recipe easy enough for the likes of me. Luckily, I came upon bonne femme, whose literal translation is “good wife” but means “in a simple manner.” I believe the recipe included mushrooms, wine, and butter, three unintimidating ingredients.

  We sat side by side in her suite and ate my fish, and she kept telling me how delicious the food was, even if it was not.

  I’ll say this about early-twentieth-century movie stars: they sure understood men.

  After eating about fifty thousand hot breakfasts, lunches, and dinners (my mother never served a cold meal at home), I stand firm on certain issues. I believe boiled lobster is a great mistake. Remember, I’m from Philadelphia, home of the broiled lobster. It is my belief that boiling is an inferior technique popularized by New England seafood shanties too lazy to cook lobster the correct way.

  I believe in American beef, but I’m convinced French chefs cook steak better than Americans. I am certain the finest food book is Larousse Gastronomique, an encyclopedia of (mostly) French food that I skim on quiet nights, the way some men peruse baseball record books.

  I think side dishes are the most overlooked aspect of cuisine, and the most skilled practitioner of that art is Vongerichten, whose chickpea fries and beet tartare should be celebrated as his signature side dishes.

  I am thankful for muffins, because their acceptance has made it permissible for us to eat cake for breakfast.

  F O R K I T O V E R

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  I have also never been able to resist the classics. When Eric Ripert, the current owner and chef of Le Bernardin, prepared sole almondine using fish from Brittany and fresh almonds, I declared it one of his greatest triumphs and announced that the item had to go on his menu. He replied, “You’re crazy if you think I will put a dish two hundred years old on my menu and go out of business.” I love the hopelessly outdated dessert cart at Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia. Georges Perrier’s pastries include buttercream dacquoise, opera cake, and even a slice of all-but-forgotten marjolaine, an ancient cream cake. I cannot resist cheese steaks, regardless of how little I respect them, because all Philadelphians are drawn to them. I don’t admire Sunday buffets; the steamship round of beef is invariably tough. I don’t enjoy eating outdoors, although folks in Manhattan make a habit of it, inhaling the bracing scent of buses passing by. I despise menus with heart symbols alongside the low-fat items, which only goes to remind me that the food I’ve ordered amounts to suicide. I refuse to dine out more than once with anybody who orders a Cognac when the rest of us are finished and ready to go home. I miss tableside preparations, even though they were typically done by captains who couldn’t cook.

  I also have a dream menu. My perfect meal would start with an assortment of amuse-gueules from the French Laundry in Napa Valley, supplemented by lobster-and-black-truffle beggar’s purses from March in Manhattan. The first course would be carne cruda (raw chopped veal) with white truffles from Trattoria della Posta in Mon-forte d’Alba, and if truffles weren’t in season, I’d happily switch to the red-curry steak tartare from Lumiere in West Newton, outside Boston.

  Then soup—I have stronger feelings about soup than the average man. No soup surpasses the artichoke puree with black truffles and Parmigiano Reggiano from Guy Savoy in Paris, but I equally love the steamed pork-and-crab soup buns topped with fresh ginger and black vinegar sauce from Shanghai Tide in Queens.

  I’d slip in something Tuscan about now. First the ricotta-and-potato flan with ragu from Cibrèo, followed by tagliatelle made from chestnut flour and topped with fresh ricotta cheese and toasted pine nuts from 1 4

  A L A N R I C H M A N

  Da Delfina in Artimino, outside Florence. My fish course would be rum-and-pepper-painted grouper from Norman’s in Coral Gables, Florida. I’d also want a shrimp-and-roasted-garlic tamale from Mesa Grill in New York. I’m a little ashamed to admit that this is my favorite Mexican dish, because it almost certainly isn’t authentically Mexican.

  If some kindly wine collector would supply a 1978 Bruno Giacosa Santa Stefano Riserva Barbaresco, the meat course would be a buffalo filet with porcini mushrooms from the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. You can’t count on those wine collectors, though, so I’ll happily accept the cured, poached, braised, and glazed pork breast from Restaurant Daniel in Manhattan. It is so soft and savory I think of it as Kobe pork.

  The cheese: Vacherin, perfectly ripe, or Epoisses, almost
over the hill. The wines: white and red Burgundies from the list at restaurant Montrachet in Manhattan, even though I can’t afford any bottle labeled Le Montrachet.

  For dessert I’d have Pavlova the way it’s done at JoJo in New York: soft meringue, passion fruit sorbet, whipped cream, and passion fruit seeds. The Pavlova is light, though, and I might also require a small crème brûlée, most profoundly prepared at Manhattan’s Le Cirque 2000.

  I want to have this fantasy meal at Le Cirque, at my favorite table.

  It’s down the corridor from the entrance, halfway to the bar, up a few steps, out of the way. From there I can see everybody and everything without being noticed. I’m certain I’m the only patron who would consider this an ideal table, but, after all, I am a restaurant critic.

  — Alan Richman

  June 2004

  A P P E T I Z E R S

  A M O T H E R ’ S K N I S H E S

  When my mother was a younger woman, scarcely into her eighties, she required surgery. The procedure did not go well, which surprised me, because she is so resilient I’d expected her to check into the hospital before dawn and be out in time for an Early Bird.

  I immediately flew to southern Florida, both to comfort her and to take my father out for a meal. The nurses on her floor had alerted me that he wasn’t eating, which they blamed on anxiety. I had a different interpretation. Anybody who had dined at my mother’s table for nearly a half-century would find it depressing to eat at anybody else’s.

  My mother rallied long enough to brief me on the contents of her freezer, should we wish to stop home for a bite, and my father and I left for lunch. We drove to Sam’s, in the nearby town of Margate, an informal kosher spot he would grudgingly patronize on the occasions when my mother refused to cook. That occurred rarely, and only after she decided she was being exploited because the other Jewish women in her building had negotiated freedom from the culinary arts as part of their retirement packages. Within twenty-four hours, my mother would be back at the stove, drawn like a blintz to sour cream.

  My father tolerated Sam’s because the food seemed Jewish and a complete lunch went for $5.99. Since nothing was going to rival what he got at home, he thought it wasteful to allow the price of a restaurant meal to creep into double figures.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  I made him finish everything, from the chicken soup to the noodle pudding. We lingered, never imagining that we were needed back at the hospital. Minutes after our departure, the surgeon who had performed the first operation on my mother decided she needed a second one without delay.

  He ordered her strapped to a gurney, then stood by, awaiting my father’s signature on a release form. As we walked through the front door, an alert guard spotted us and rushed us upstairs. Immediately, orderlies started pushing my mother through the hallway with me half-walking and half-running by her side. A sense of peril overwhelmed me. I was certain this was the last time I would see her alive.

  As they turned to enter a waiting elevator, my mother grabbed my arm and weakly spoke my name. I nearly burst out sobbing, for I knew these would be the last words I would hear from her.

  I leaned close.

  “How was the soup?” she asked.

  My mother is ninety-four and doing all right, although not as well as my sister and I would like. Ida and Norman still live in their Florida retirement community, which permits no dogs, no kids, and no striplings under fifty-five. I talk a lot with my sister, Lynn, about how long they can hold out. They have help, women who are hired to work twelve hours a day but who stay overnight on the difficult days, when the anguish of being elderly becomes an impossible burden.

  The women who watch after them were not born in this country and are candidates for beatification, which should clarify my position on this nation’s immigration policy.

  Pretty much to the exclusion of all else, my mother spent her adult life cooking for her family. (To be honest, she cleaned incessantly, too.) I understand that all Jewish mothers are expected to be kitchen enthusiasts, but my mother was defined by her cooking. She was admired for those skills, and even today, when she can’t do much, the people in her building greet her warmly, the sort of recognition André Soltner must get when he walks down Fiftieth Street near Lutèce. Indra Chattoo, F O R K I T O V E R

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  who has commanded the team overseeing my parents for the past three years, says my mother remains a luminary among residents, acclaimed for her brisket of beef and her rolled cabbage. Chattoo told me, “The people remember the taste of her food, and they still talk about it.” Cooking gave my mother stature in the world outside her kitchen.

  Long before the advent of celebrity chefs, she was the celebrity cook of our neighborhood, no matter where we lived. Her cooking was ritualistic, because she would prepare the same recipes over and over, but she was no different from the conductors of symphony orchestras, who have personal repertoires.

  Food was her means of expressing love. Some might argue that a few hugs would have been more beneficial to a growing child, but I tried to understand. She wasn’t tremendously confident, and bestowing food was a wonderful way of making a fuss without chancing rejection. Even people who don’t want to be squeezed enjoy being fed.

  I try to cook exactly as my mother did, even though she stubbornly resisted my efforts to learn from her. Her rolled cabbage stuffed with rice and ground beef, which she would not teach me to make, was the finest the world has known. Its secret is lost. By hanging around I picked up enough about her cheese blintzes and her brisket that I now do a credible job of imitating the former and am on the verge of a breakthrough with the latter.

  One afternoon, to my disbelief, she prepared her poor-man’s soup before my eyes. It’s a blend of Manischewitz split-pea soup mix, beef-marrow bones, chopped onions, and grated carrots. I made a pot of it for my father a few months ago, to see if I’d gotten it right, and he reacted as though his only son had translated the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  This man, who in his later years laughs hesitantly and smiles infrequently, beamed with such pleasure he reminded me of the young fellow I’d heard stories about—the captain of his college baseball team, a nimble and hard-hitting second baseman who tried out for the Cincinnati Reds in the 1930s but was denied an opportunity to play in the major leagues for the same reason as so many other Jews: he was remarkably slow afoot.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  Because I grew up eating only my mother’s cooking, I find it unsatisfactory to work from recipe books, prepare food devised by people I’ve never met. I believe I love restaurants so much because I ate in so few of them as a child that they seem the greatest of luxuries. When my mother and father went out for dinner, which wasn’t often, they seldom took my sister and me with them. When they did, my mother never failed to reinforce her dessert credo, which I adhere to even today:

  “You can’t go wrong with ice cream.”

  My mother still cooks, sort of. She sits in the kitchen with the saintly women who care for her and instructs them in modified kosher cuisine. She has taught them the difference between milchedig (dairy-based) and flayshedig (meat-based) meals. They made gefilte fish (Jewish quenelles) for the religious holidays. The recipe, as practiced by a ninety-four-year-old woman: Purchase one can of Rokeach gefilte fish. Remove fish and place in a pot. Add the goo from the can, sliced carrots, chopped onions, salt, pepper, sugar, and a bay leaf. Boil. Cool.

  Serve. It isn’t her real recipe, but there is something of my mother in it, and that’s pretty good.

  When I asked my father what he missed most about my mother these days, he said, predictably, “Her cooking, very much.” I asked him what he thought about when he saw her in the kitchen, and he said,

  “She’s not able to do anything anymore. She is sitting there, watching somebody else peel the potatoes, and I can only think she must be terribly hurt inside.”

  Not long ago, I drove to Somerville, New Jerse
y. I was born there, in the house where my mother grew up. In the forties and fifties it was the nicest home on the block, but now most of the original dark-brown shingles are gone, replaced by shingles painted three or four different colors and some not painted at all. Quite a few aren’t even shingles, just scraps of wood hammered over holes.

  Both my parents were born on New York’s Lower East Side, and they carried out their courtship in Somerville, over a table in the back of my grandmother’s store. They met in the thirties, the time of the Great F O R K I T O V E R

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  Depression. Although the people of that era are now extravagantly referred to as the Greatest Generation, I think of my mother and father as members of the Quietest Generation. They and their parents had endured too much poverty, death, and hunger for their lives to be colorfully anecdotal. They were children of the oppressed, of parents who lived in the meager shtetls of Europe, the Jewish ghettos famous for all manner of deficiencies, among them food. A few years back, I managed to coerce my parents into providing an outline of their lives, a few stark facts.

  My father told me he grew up so poor he and his brothers got jobs in food markets in order to bring home groceries, never mind asking for cash. My mother said, “We weren’t poor,” which she certainly wasn’t in comparison to my father.

  “My mother had a store,” she said, “and we took things off the shelf to eat. She had a kitchen in the back, and we ate in the store.” I asked my father, jokingly, if he married my mother for her food, and he said, “It’s no joke. After I graduated from Montclair State, I got my first job, and I was still kosher. My father, who was in wholesale dry goods, had two or three customers in Somerville who kept kosher, and he solicited them to see if he could find somewhere for me to eat.

  One agreed, for fifty cents a dinner. After two years, they threw me out because I didn’t pay enough attention to their daughter. Then, where did I turn to get a kosher meal? Ida’s mother.” At the time, he was living in a boardinghouse run by a kindly Irish lady, Mrs. Flaherty, who tried unsuccessfully to get him to eat bacon for breakfast. Dinner at the Flaherty’s was not an option. He and my mother worked at the same school, and he asked her if he could eat with her family for the same fifty cents. The money, my mother proudly told me, went into a little can used by Jewish families to collect contributions for the poor. Every home had one of them, a pushke, a can with a slot in the top for coins. When I was a child, ours seemed sacred to me. I might once or twice have lifted a nickel from my sister’s piggy bank, driven by an addiction to Raisinets, but on my life I would not have stolen from that holy tin can.