The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner Read online

  Praise for The Man Who Ate the World

  “While [Rayner] never takes himself too seriously, he approaches a meal with rigor.”

  —The New Yorker Online

  “Rayner begins in Las Vegas and ends in France a bit worse for the wear, like Don Quixote after the smoke and mirrors clear. Still hungry.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “There’s a lot to love here. . . . Will diners in Dubai, Vegas, or London like the book as much as we do? Who cares?”

  —Grub Street, NewYorkMagazine.com

  “Rayner puts his thoughtful, innovative and hilarious stamp on food writing. . . . The Man Who Ate the World is a fascinating and riotous look at the business and pleasure of fine dining.”

  —SouthtownStar (Chicago)

  “[Rayner] explores the oft-overblown luxury dining of the world. . . . Fun to watch.”

  —Gawker.com

  “Jay Rayner’s laugh-out-loud funny account of grazing his way through the world’s high-end restaurants is unputdownable. . . . Like a perfect meal, this book is finished way too soon.”

  —Debra Ginsberg, Shelf Awareness

  “The combination of zest for glorious gastronomic abundance and the nagging sensation that he’s propping up a corrupt system of gilded-age excess gives Rayner’s book a real-world frisson that rarely finds its way into food writing. . . . Readers will be delighted to participate vicariously in the globetrotting feast of an inquisitive glutton who remembers that somebody has to pay for it all.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A witty world tour of gastronomic culture.”

  —Scotland on Sunday (UK)

  “Vivid food and travel writing . . . Rayner is agreeable company.”

  —Observer Review (UK)

  “Definitely worth sinking your teeth into.”

  —Food & Travel (UK)

  “Funny and engaging, it’s an entertaining and informative look at global gastronomy.”

  —BBC Good Food Magazine (UK)

  “A warm and affecting writer.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (UK)

  THE MAN

  WHO ATE THE

  WORLD

  ALSO BY JAY RAYNER

  FICTION

  The Marble Kiss

  Day of Atonement

  Eating Crow

  The Oyster House Siege

  NON-FICTION

  Star Dust Falling

  THE

  MAN WHO

  ATE THE

  WORLD

  IN SEARCH OF

  THE PERFECT DINNER

  JAY RAYNER

  A Holt Paperback

  Henry Holt and Company / New York

  Holt Paperbacks

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  A Holt Paperback® and ® are registered trademarks of

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jay Rayner

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rayner, Jay.

  The man who ate the world : in search of the perfect dinner / Jay Rayner.—1. st US ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-9023-9

  ISBN-10: 0-8050-9023-1

  1. Gastronomy. 2. Food writing. I. Title.

  TX633.R39 2008

  641’.013—dc22 2007043905

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums.

  For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  Originally published in hardcover in 2008 by Henry Holt and Company

  First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2009

  Designed by Michelle McMillian

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  FOR DANIEL,

  a small boy with a big appetite

  CONTENTS

  Warning!

  I Want Proper Dinner

  ONE: Las Vegas

  TWO: Moscow

  THREE: Dubai

  FOUR: Tokyo

  FIVE: New York

  SIX: London

  SEVEN: Paris

  Check, Please

  Acknowledgments

  THE MAN

  WHO ATE THE

  WORLD

  WARNING!

  Reading this book will make you hungry. Hunger can seriously affect your ability to concentrate and, after a few pages, you will be incapable of appreciating either the grace or the subtleties of my writing. You will also become confused by the twists in the narrative. As a result, you may fail to grasp my justifications for some of the dodgier episodes, particularly the Paris thing. I need you at the top of your game when we finally get to the Paris thing. It is therefore in my interest to give you some tips on how to read this book.

  Do not attempt to read it after dinner. You might think that, being sated, you will not succumb to hunger. This is true, but you will succumb, instead, to drowsiness, and that is worse than hunger. Unless, of course, you are the type of person who does not eat a dinner substantial enough to engender drowsiness. In which case you are not greedy enough to be reading this book. Put it down. You won’t enjoy it.

  Better to read it between mealtimes with snacks at your side. Salted nuts area good idea, but not shell-on pistachios. Even if you get into a good rhythm, expertly picking the kernels from within their shells, you will still be partially distracted and that serves nobody. You would be wise to leave them in the cupboard for time spent in front of the television, unless they are Turkish pistachios. Turkish pistachios are the best in the world and deserve to be eaten whenever the opportunity arises. If you have some Turkish pistachios, leave this book until later and eat them first.

  Fruit is a good idea, though not all of it. A banana is both satisfying and easy to eat while reading. An orange is not. Naturally, being a person of taste, you will choose a quality orange, a seriously juicy one that will make your hands sticky and that can only hinder your enjoyment. I want you to have a good time during your reading of this book, and juice-slicked hands will surely only get in the way of the perfect experience.

  The best option is to read it over a meal by yourself in a small restaurant, the kind that doesn’t have too much glassware on the table. Some people are wary of eating in restaurants alone, for fear that others will think them a complete loser. Don’t worry too much about this. At times you may find yourself laughing out loud at what you have just read. Other diners will immediately decide that you are not a loser, just a little mad. They will stop staring at you after that. If nothing funny has happened in the book by about halfway through your main course, you may want to laugh out loud, anyway, while staring at your plate. This is always a good strategy when eating by yourself. If it’s available, make sure to order Armagnac. This has nothing to do with a successful reading of the book. People just don’t drink enough Armagnac in restaurants these days and those that serve it ought to be encouraged.

  I will understand if you choose to ignore my advice, for many people have. I am aware I don’t have all the answers. Still, I hope you won’t blame me if, after a few pages, you find yourself feeling ravenous and irritable and desperate. This is something my time as a restaurant critic has taught me: I can only be a guide, not a leader. I can point people in the direction of a good place to eat. I can tell them which are the best dishes on the menu and which are not. But I cannot do the ordering for them, however much I might wish to.

&nb
sp; You have been warned.

  I WANT PROPER DINNER

  I was eleven years old the first time I ate in a restaurant alone. It was the dining room of a wooden-framed hotel in an unglamorous Swiss village close to the Italian border, and I wasn’t even meant to be there. I was staying down the road at another hotel, with a group from my school on a skiing trip, and had to pass it every day as I trudged back from the slopes, bruised and humiliated. The place where we were staying was an unlovely gray, modern block that smelt of mothballs. This hotel was built from heavily carved and darkly varnished timbers, and looked like a stately galleon afloat on the oceans of that winter’s snows. By the front door, under glass, was a menu written in an expansive italic. Most of it made no sense to me. It was in two languages and I understood neither of them. There was one word I did recognize, a word no restaurant ever bothered to translate because the original French did the job: escargots.

  I had first eaten snails in garlic butter at home in northwest London, where my mother prepared them from a do-it-yourself pack sold in the local supermarket. They came in a transparent plastic tube. At the bottom was a can of the naked snails, which looked like big fat commas when they were pulled from the brine and laid out to dry; stacked above them in the tube were the creamy-colored shells, patterned with swirls of brown and gray. Laboriously my mother poked the snails into the shells. She back-filled them with garlic and parsley butter, and then grilled them. They were cooked often in our house in the 1970s though mostly as dinner-party food, when the kids were not there, but sometimes we got to eat them, too, and I loved the hot, salty, garlicky melted butter and the dark rubbery prey that bathed in it.

  Now I was in Switzerland and, having been surprised to discover that skiing was not a sport for an overweight boy with weak ankles and fallen arches, I was horribly homesick. With the twisted logic of the eleven-year-old, I concluded that eating something French would make me feel better about not being in Britain.

  That evening, after we had been served dinner at our hotel—a gray soup of some kind, some grayer meat and vegetables—I slipped away in search of Technicolor. I cannot imagine what the staff made of the prepubescent English boy, sitting alone in the almost-deserted dining room, round belly to the table’s edge, humming to himself as he set to work, expertly, with the spring-loaded escargot tongs, a spiked prong, and an arsenal of fresh, crisp bread. I know I was happy. The snails came on their own ornate iron stand, complete with inbuilt meths burner, and as the flame guttered underneath, the generous slick of butter from the shells became so hot in each dimple, I could fry my bread in it. This I did until all the bread and all the butter was gone. I paid and left, absolutely clear in my mind as to how I would be spending my evenings on this trip from now on.

  I returned the next day, and the day after that (once with a friend), until on the fourth night the waiter didn’t even bother to bring me the menu; he just presented me with the snails.

  I had emptied all the shells and was busy frying my bread, when I noticed wisps of smoke lifting from the plate. I liked my bread really crisp and on this evening had turned the flame up as high as it could go without, for a moment, thinking there might be consequences. Within seconds of the smoke appearing, the butter ignited, producing an impressive cone of flame at least a foot high, which burned enthusiastically on the ponds of dairy fat. I must have sat rigid with terror, because I have no memory of the waiter advancing upon me, only that he was suddenly at my side. This was a dangerous moment. The only thing that wasn’t immediately inflammable in that restaurant was the cutlery, and the inferno on the table in front of me posed a real threat. The waiter didn’t flinch. He opened the window next to me, letting in a sudden burst of frigid night air, picked up the burner from the base, and heaved it out into the snow. He wiped his hands on his apron, closed the window, and we agreed it was time he brought me the bill. My adventure was over.

  Walking back to my own hotel that night I was disappointed, because I knew I could not return. Nevertheless I was comforted by the knowledge that my family would be impressed by what had happened. It wouldn’t have mattered to them if, in that one week, I had developed into a world-champion standard downhill skier. It would have made no difference if I had broken the slope record. They would have been pleased for me if I was pleased with myself but, as far as my parents were concerned, any eleven-year-old kid could learn to ski. But ordering snails in a restaurant! All by himself! That was a different matter entirely.

  This is how it had always been in my family. My parents were both children of the Depression, knew what it was to go without, and were not about to revisit the experience, either on themselves or their kids, so we were a house of plenty. I always said that, culturally, I was only a Jew by food, and it’s true that there was no room at the Rayner house for ritual or faith. The Jewish god was far too picky an eater to be given space at our table. Forego sausages and bacon? Reject shellfish and cheeseburgers, all in the name of mumbo jumbo? Don’t be ridiculous.

  Yet there was, I think, something fundamentally Jewish about our way with food: the noisiness of the dinner table, the stomach-aching generosity, the deep comfort we sought from it. Food was what we did. Long before anybody had thought to initiate a debate on the importance of allowing small children into restaurants, my parents were taking all three of us out to eat on a regular basis: to Stone’s Chophouse near Piccadilly Circus, and a grand old Italian called Giovanni’s on the Charing Cross Road, and the great Chinese places in Chinatown or along Queensway near Hyde Park, where the chefs stood in the window hand-pulling noodles. By the time he was four my brother was so good with chopsticks, the waiters often assumed he had been raised in Hong Kong, and I had developed a taste for chicken with cashew nuts in yellow bean sauce, or for deep-fried seaweed scattered with golden crumbs of dried scallop; dishes that were rarely found outside of Chinatown back then, let alone outside of London.

  Unsurprisingly the story my parents most like to tell about me involves a rebellion at the kitchen table. It was a hot summer’s evening in 1973, I was six years old, and for dinner my mother had decided to serve salad and a slab of mahogany-brown smoked mackerel, with a brutal cure and slimy skin. I hated smoked mackerel and said so. My mother told me that if I didn’t like it I should leave the table, so I did.

  A quarter of an hour later, when I had not sloped back to my chair and my plate, they came looking for me. I was nowhere to be found and my parents became worried until, looking out of the window, they spotted me on the pavement in front of the house. I had known exactly how to respond to this challenge of theirs. After all, it was a time in Britain of great industrial strife and protest. Pictures of it were on the television news every evening. Taking my lead from those images I had gone upstairs and found a piece of cardboard, around which my father’s shirts were folded when they came back from the laundry. To that I had taped a ruler. I had then scrawled a message on the card and was now to be found picketing the house with the placard held high bearing the legend “I want proper dinner.”

  My parents laughed. As I recall they also congratulated me on my initiative, though they still insisted that I come back inside to the kitchen table from which I had fled, and eat what I had been given. I did as I was told.

  Despite its repetition I like this story. It’s the sort of story that should lie in the history of someone who later became a restaurant critic. And yet, it was precisely because of my family’s interest in food that it didn’t for a moment occur to me that it might be possible to earn a living from going out to eat. Sitting around a well-laid table was such a part of life, of being, that it couldn’t possibly be a job. Look, Mum! They’re paying me to breathe!

  Instead I became a different type of journalist. I wrote about murderers and politicians. I covered war crimes trials, and pursued terrorists. I interviewed movie directors, worked abroad occasionally for the foreign pages, and once interviewed a high-class hooker about the business of prostitution while sitting in a bath with her. I
still wanted proper dinner but, for the moment, I had to pay for it myself.

  All that changed in 1999, when the editor of The Observer newspaper’s magazine supplement suggested quietly that I might like to try my hand at the restaurant column. The editor of the newspaper resisted the appointment. He wanted me to carry on pursuing terrorists and sitting in baths with cocaine-snorting hookers, but I wasn’t giving up that easily. This was too great an opportunity, not least because Britain’s restaurants were undergoing a period of revolution and renewal unlike any other. It was on my watch that both Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck and Gordon Ramsay would achieve their third Michelin stars. With his high-end French cooking Ramsay displayed a mastery of crisp neoclassical technique; Blumenthal experimented with snail porridge and smoky bacon ice cream and showed it was possible to innovate and startle without losing sight of the imperative of deliciousness. Together, both of them inspired a new generation of talented chefs. Gastro-pubs spread around the country, too, and while it remained (and remains) possible to starve across huge swaths of Britain for want of a good meal, there was no doubt the map was being redrawn. It was a very good time to be patrolling the waterfront.

  I wasn’t satisfied, though. A part of me—the large, greedy part—was constantly pursued by the fear that, for all the good food I was getting to experience, somewhere out there was a great meal, the ultimate meal, and that I was missing out on it. My day job was to travel the country, eating in restaurants. At night, in my time off, I would go online and read about restaurants elsewhere in the world that I couldn’t reach. I would spend hours on Websites like egullet.org, where obsessives with deep pockets write long accounts of the meals they have eaten, complete with photographs. There were, it seemed, a lot of people out there who loved photographing their dinner. More worryingly was the fact that I liked looking at them. I wanted to know what the tasting menu was like at the Hotel Le Bristol in Paris or Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago or Tetsuya’s in Sydney. I became an avid reader of food blogs written by people with ripe and exotic names. There was Steve Plotnicki, a multimillionaire New Yorker with a wheat intolerance and a habit of taking with him to restaurants hugely expensive bottles of wine from his own cellar, even when he was visiting cheap kebab joints. There was Pim Techamuanvivit, a Thai woman now living in San Francisco whose blog, Chez Pim, had become a cult because of its mix of intricate recipes from the streets of Bangkok and its detailed accounts of dinners in the three-star gastronomic temples of Paris. There was Simon Majumdar, a half-Welsh, half-Bengali, London-based publisher whose slogan was “Carbs are death” and who liked to write long eulogies in praise of the pig.