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

  The night I arrived, Lagasse was not among the kitchen cut-ups.

  Seated to the left of me were Sally and Bill from Newburyport, which is just north of Boston. Seated to the right of me was a local couple from nearby Metairie, just engaged. I asked Sally if she was disappointed that Emeril wasn’t around, and she replied, “Oh, I knew he wouldn’t be here. He owns three restaurants around here. He’s never at any of them.”

  She then proceeded to relate a celebrity cautionary tale involving two of her children: one went to a celebrity lacrosse camp—who knew that lacrosse even had celebrities?—and the famous player was barely there. “He said two words and that was it. He wasn’t on the field. He wasn’t cheering the kids,” she said. The other attended a celebrity hockey camp featuring Mario Lemieux, and he was around for “maybe five minutes.”

  Sally, relentlessly upbeat, had decided that Emeril’s kitchen staff needed a lot of cheering up. “They’re pretty down guys,” she said. She pointed to the salad guy, whom she described as really glum. Hearing that, the young blond on my right, who identified herself as Emmily (yes, that’s how they spell “Emily” in Louisiana) chipped in. “I thought there would be more interaction, like at a hibachi,” she said.

  I ordered the “dégustation,” or tasting, menu, and everybody else’s food was a lot more fun than mine. Such a menu has many small por-F O R K I T O V E R

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  tions, and tiny food is not what Lagasse does best. I got to try a lot of Sally’s dinner, and it was wonderful, particularly the grilled rib-eye steak with foie gras butter.

  I learned a lot from Sally. She ordered better than I did, and she knew more about celebrity pitfalls. Although it was her first visit to the restaurant, she understood what to expect, a lesson those who patronize celebrity restaurants should bear in mind. “If you’re sitting here thinking Emeril is going to show up,” she said to me, “it isn’t going to happen.” Did it matter that none of the chefs were at their restaurants? As far as food preparation was concerned, it did only at Olives, the restaurant of Todd English. His recipes are knockouts, and a competent chef watching over the underachieving kitchen would have made an enormous difference. The food was up to par at Spago, Chez Panisse, Babbo, and Emeril’s. Even if Rocco had been on Twenty-second Street, he couldn’t have rescued Rocco’s on 22nd.

  Where gratification and pleasure were concerned, their absence did make a difference. Perhaps if we went to restaurants to sustain ourselves nutritionally, it wouldn’t matter if they showed up—and if that were the case, Chez Panisse might then be thought of as the finest restaurant in America. But that isn’t why we dine out.

  We go for a breathtaking experience, much as we go to the theater, to be part of something spectacular. Without the star cooking the food, or at least striding through the dining room, there’s only a fraction of the expected thrill. Or we go to be coddled, to take pleasure in being someplace where we’ll be welcomed. For most of us, a visit to a celebrity restaurant is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We’re never going to get to know the maître d’ or the waiters or the girl who brings the bread, so only the presence of the celebrity chef can make us feel special.

  I thought I’d be immune to all this. I set out believing that I didn’t care about celebrity chefs. I’d had enough of celebrities back when I was a reporter for People magazine. Yet I felt something was lacking everywhere I ate, even at Spago, where the food could not have been better.

  What was missing was the chefs.

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  It seems absurd to me that I should have been affected this way.

  I know celebrities are generally the most remote and unapproachable individuals on the planet, rarely bursting with love. I realize everyone who patronizes celebrity restaurants is supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to taste celebrity cuisine, even if the sous-chef is preparing it. Still, I felt cheated. Seeing those famous faces is important. We can go anywhere if all we want is a hot meal.

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  P A L A T E C L E A N S E R

  Ten Commandments for Restaurants

  1. Don’t Underestimate Our Intelligence — or Our Math Skills I once ordered the three-dollar cheese plate at a New York restaurant and got an ungarnished chunk of “cave-aged” Gruyère so tiny that I shook my head in despair. The waitress huffed, “It’s a full half-ounce.” Maybe the cheese was raised in a cave, but I wasn’t. Using my junior high math skills, I calculated that the Gruyère was going for a mere $96 a pound, the sort of markup that would make even truffle salesmen blush.

  2. Don’t Put Me On Hold More Than Once Maître d’s (sorry—reservationists) have mastered this art. “May I put you on hold?” asks Chad, who punches the button before you can reply. I’ll put up with this once, but when Chad does it again, I hang up and never call back. Restaurants that continually have customers listening to Kenny G’s greatest hits should have a truthful recorded message: “We’re so popular we don’t give a damn if you come to our restaurant, so we’re putting you on hold again and again, and if you even think of complaining, your name will go on our blacklist and you’ll forever be deprived of our ninety-dollar ‘market menu’ consisting of small portions of stuff the chef got cheap.” 3. Don’t Banish Us to the Bar as Punishment The all-too-common phrase “Your table isn’t quite ready” invariably means the customer is sent off grumbling to a packed bar. Restaurants that can’t honor reservations on time should offer some sort of conso-2 3 8

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  lation to inconvenienced guests, even if it’s nothing more than a complimentary glass of the not-very-good house wine. The first kind word to a customer shouldn’t come after he’s seated, when the bread boy asks, in various fractured languages, “You want the chapati, the focaccia, or the ficelle?”

  4. Don’t Push the Austrian Zweigelt Unless You Know Something About It

  Wine lists are becoming packed with obscure bottles from all over the world. Having a Portuguese Castelão on a list is fine as long as there’s a sommelier on hand to describe it, but too many restaurants are leaving the job to waiters who have no clue—no restaurant would put bar-ramundi on its menu without explaining that it’s an Australian game fish. By the way, both the Zweigelt and the Castelão are red.

  5. Specials Should Never Be Expensive

  Nothing is more annoying than an off-the-menu côte de boeuf special for two that turns out to cost $38.95 per person, way out of line with other prices. Granted, the waiter who lovingly described the steak to you shouldn’t have to announce the price—that makes everybody feel cheap and creepy. But if a maître d’ with a phony Italian accent is going to shave white truffles over your tagliatelle, the dish shouldn’t cost $72, unless everything else does. Nobody should have to take out a home equity loan just to afford the venison of the day.

  6. Knock Off the “Day-Boat” Routine

  Sure, like I really believe there’s an armada of fishing boats sailing off every morning at daybreak and returning at dusk, just so every restaurant in America can put day-boat halibut or day-boat cod on its menu.

  7. Waiters Must Never Ask “Who Gets the Soup?” While I’m Regaling My Guests

  I know, I know, our waiter is very busy. A lot to do. There isn’t a waiter alive who doesn’t believe the restaurant would close without him. That’s F O R K I T O V E R

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  why he can’t wait for me to finish my sentence before he interrupts my lively conversation to ask the eternal question, “Would you like fresh pepper on that?”

  8. Don’t Ask “Is Everything All Right?” Unless You Want an Honest Answer

  In a world filled with perfunctory gestures, this is the worst. When the restaurant owner comes by the table to ask this question, he wants us to tell him that his joint is unrivaled. Sure it is. The chef is putting canned pâté on the tournedos, the sommelier is into the cooking wine, and the carpet in the dining room hasn’t been replaced since 1973. And we’re s
upposed to tell him everything is all right?

  9. Ban the Banquette

  What is this, the Last Supper? I hate sitting side by side with my friends (and their coats), all of us up against the sticky red Naugahyde cushion. Why is it that everybody hates the middle seat on an airplane but doesn’t mind banquettes? (At least on airplanes, the sparkling water comes free.) By the way, I don’t like booths, either, but I know everybody else does.

  10. Bring Back the Dress Code

  I’m tired of putting on a jacket to go out to dinner and finding myself surrounded by velour tracksuits. At the very least, announce your lack of standards with a sign: we welcome slobs.

  S I D E S

  M Y B E E F W I T H V E G A N S

  My first contact with hard-core veganism occurred in the offices of GQ, heretofore never thought of as a breeding ground for countercul-tural doctrine. An editor who is a fierce vegan sent me a note urging that I repent and “see that meat eating has grim consequences that extend beyond the health of the individual omnivore.” I can see why I might not be a vegan icon, considering my predisposition to lurk hungrily in the foyers of butcher shops.

  Included with his overture was a guide to veganism (“Think of all the exciting new foods you’ll be trying”) and a pamphlet entitled “101

  Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian.” It was indeed informative. I learned that the combined weight of all the cattle on earth is greater than the combined weight of the entire human population. The solution, as I see it, is to eat more cows.

  Vegans do not eat meat, of course. Nor do they admire anyone who does. They are the radical arm of the vegetarian movement, ill tempered all the time. One of their fundamental tenets, that it is immoral to eat eggs, milk, butter, or any of the fruits of animal labor, makes them seem a few beans short of a burrito. Another of their goals, to put an end to cruelty in commercial slaughterhouses, is compelling enough to make me uncomfortable.

  As they lurch between acts of insanity and acts of humanity, vegans seem no better or worse than any of our domestic extremists, the ones I do my best to ignore. What appalls me about them is that they 2 4 4

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  are not content to exorcise pleasure from their own dinner tables.

  They insist that everybody who enjoys eating join them in their odd brand of masochism.

  Not all people who decline to eat meat are like them. Macrobiotics, who share the vegan affinity for food colored unattractive shades of brown, are kindly souls who believe in the Zen principle of not irritat-ing everybody with whom they come in contact. The way I see it, macrobiotics is the art of prolonging life, whereas veganism is the art of making life not worth prolonging. The ovo-lacto-vegetarians we see around all the time are much more tolerable. They are actually happier than most people, since all they eat are giant chocolate-chip cookies.

  I’ve always felt vegans are best avoided, and they have certain attributes that make them easy to identify and evade. First is their grimness.

  At the vegan restaurant Angelica Kitchen, in New York’s East Village, I asked my waitress, an attractive young woman with green fingernails, for some of the best vegan pickup lines tried on her. She replied bluntly,

  “Vegans aren’t funny.” Another is their pallor, a minor side effect of existing on a diet that cannot sustain human life. A third is the miso stains on their hemp wear, while the fourth is the terrifying attitude they assume.

  I have heard stories, all reputedly true, of the outrages perpetuated by the worst of them. A vegan invited into a home throws open the refrigerator door and announces that children are being poisoned. A vegan served honey by a kindly host denounces it as “bee puke.” A Mem-phis rib joint is spray-painted, the owner warned that his family could be the next to suffer. An Austin, Texas, newspaper columnist receives a death threat after poking fun at them. It would be nice to believe these are the deeds of isolated rogue vegans, but I’m skeptical. I suspect I have just made a list of what vegans consider a good time.

  I myself have sat beside vegans, eaten with them, listened to the horror-movie mantra they utter lifelessly to one another upon meeting:

  “Where did you get your protein?” I have tales to tell, stories that would curdle the very milk vegans forbid their children to drink. The most terF O R K I T O V E R

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  rible one is of a beautiful young woman I know who turned vegan and immediately fell for her yoga instructor.

  Since vegan women eat nothing and are therefore as skinny as super-models, they are unusually attractive to men, but there is no sense in ordinary men pursuing them. Vegan women all fall hopelessly in love with their yoga instructors. These are spindly yet extraordinarily flexi-ble guys who project an irresistible air of serenity and piety. Yoga instructors don’t have students; they have harems. Here is the story of my friend and what became of her.

  A Vegan Cautionary Tale

  She used to be just like you and me. She was normal and ate foie gras.

  Then she became one of them and started eating tempeh. She took a yoga class. She moved in with the instructor. This is one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard.

  These days she claims her previous life was never any fun. She says she suffered from anxiety disorders and was a “supershallow breather.” Listening to her made me wonder if all vegan recruits are shipped to reeducation camps.

  She met her new boyfriend at a big-deal Manhattan yoga center called Jivamukti. She says she went there looking for peace. At the conclusion of a class, all the students maneuvered themselves into a yoga position known as the “corpse pose,” which entails lying on a mat with hands and feet comfortably apart. This, she told me, is what happened next:

  “The teacher goes around and, as a gesture of generosity, rubs aro-matic oils together, makes heat in his hand, massages a temple or maybe gives a shoulder rub. At this point, he took oil, made it warm, picked up one of my feet, gave me a foot massage for three minutes, then the other for three minutes, massaged the lines out of my forehead. Then he was gone, disappeared.”

  I was sure she had called the police. That’s what any intelligent, successful, no-nonsense New York woman like her would do. I was about to congratulate her on helping stamp out sexual harassment in yoga 2 4 6

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  classes when she said, “I was turned on. I couldn’t believe this man had done this to a complete stranger.”

  She did not pepper-spray him. She went over and thanked him for his foot massage. She fell for the whole thing. Not long afterward, he told her she was the woman he was destined to marry. On their first date, they went to Zen Palate, where, she recalls dreamily, “We had some really good tofu with black-bean sauce.” They now live together.

  It must be good to be a vegan yoga instructor, roughly comparable to being a drummer in a rock band.

  While sitting in Angelica Kitchen, an immensely popular restaurant that must gross more money than Lutèce, I said the three little words I never expected to say in a vegan restaurant. I turned to my friends and announced, “This is delicious.” I was eating marinated tofu on mixed-grain bread. The bread was an unhealthy-looking speckled brown, and while I dislike indiscriminate speckles in my food, the bread was fresh, which is not all that common in vegan restaurants. The tofu was doing no harm, which is all I ever ask of that product, the roasted carrots added a sweet crunch, and the parsley-almond pesto was vibrant. Vibrant is another word I never expected to utter in a vegan restaurant. I was almost as pleased with the soup of the day, split-pea that could not have tasted better had a beef bone been used for the stock. In my newly devised four-tier classification of vegan food, I rated both the sandwich and the soup Worth Ordering Again.

  I was never quite as satisfied with anything else at Angelica Kitchen.

  Let me put it more precisely: I hated everything else.

  I want to be fair about this. Nobody is more close-minded than me when it comes to vegetarian cuisine, regardless of whether it
’s vegan, macrobiotic, or vegetarian. I think vegetarian restaurants generally prepare vegetables worse than nonvegetarian restaurants. Vegetarian restaurants have little respect for the individual properties of their ingredients, only a realization that one takes longer to get soft than another. I’ve always suspected that vegetarian chefs toss their turnips, potatoes, and F O R K I T O V E R

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  cabbage into the same pot and follow a one-line recipe that reads: “Turn up the heat.”

  I find vegetarian restaurants both smug and culinarily unsuccessful.

  Still, I have always been inclined to allow vegetarians to go about their business without interference from me. But I don’t feel quite the same about vegans. What infuriates me about them is their self-righteousness, their insistence that we miscreants give up our enjoyment of food and eat what they eat. I set out to determine if their dogma made any sense at all, if I was mistaken about the inferiority of their cuisine. To do that, I decided to eat at three of the most esteemed vegan restaurants in New York—the aforementioned Angelica Kitchen; the branch of Zen Palate located on Ninth Avenue; and Hangawi, in Midtown.

  Angelica Kitchen is something of a vegetarian cliché, with insufficient room between the plain, varnished-wood tables, place settings that include chopsticks for no good reason, a friendly but ineffectual staff that might well have trained on some alien plant world, and all the staples one would expect—carrot juice, sesame sauce, miso soup, mulled apple cider, and the like. Near the entrance is a community help board offering assistance with the essentials of life, such as channeling, massage, and meditation, and a lot of notices promising rewards for the return of lost animals. Vegans seem to lose more than their share of cats.