Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

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York, I am always calling over waiters and complaining that I have found olives in my bread.

While my primary challenge to Ducasse was to determine if three-star dining could be an exercise in civility rather than gluttony, I also hoped to learn something that would diminish the apprehension I feel whenever I enter a restaurant offering Mediterranean cuisine.

Le Louis XV, for all its fame and pedigree, is a room of modest dimensions, except vertically. The ceiling is so high that if all the soufflés ever cooked in France were stacked one atop the other, they would barely reach the naked ladies gamboling in the fresco up there. Closer to earth are fifteen tables set with gold-rimmed Limoges china and gold-tone silver flatware, a marble grandfather clock that might be a hand-me-down from Versailles, busts of haughty French women (are there other kinds?), and all the accoutrements of a lavish eighteenth-century lifestyle: gilded and beveled mirrors, heavy draperies with tasseled tiebacks, looming chandeliers.

The waiters, dressed in a variety of formal wear representing a service hierarchy too complex for a visitor not of royal blood to compre-hend, weave among the tables like a corps de ballet. They are mostly tall young men with black hair and fabulous dispositions. I induced polite chuckles from them whenever they began their routine of resetting the table for dessert, at which time I would threaten to go upstairs and change my shirt and tie. A regular Jerry Lewis, that’s me.

My first meal, planned and executed by Ducasse’s chef de cuisine, Franck Cerutti, was a culinary triumph that left me apprehensive. The amuse-bouche was a luscious curlicue of pure white Italian lard, not a product that has entered the mainstream of three-star dining but admirable for its agrarian ancestry. From there I proceeded to lentil-and-pheasant bouillon topped with ricotta-cheese gnocchi so light they failed to break the surface tension of the soup, sea scallops slathered with black truffles, and bass roasted to unparalleled richness. The truffles were a bonus I hadn’t anticipated. I had forgotten that during black-truffle season, December through March, three-star F O R K I T O V E R

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restaurants employ them much as midwestern housewives use Shake

’n Bake.

Dessert was baba au rhum, the rum-soaked, cream-topped sponge cake I have always considered the French equivalent of our cream-filled Twinkies. Both are mass-produced sweets that satisfy innate societal cravings, ours for calories and theirs for alcohol. The baba au rhum at Le Louis XV brought enlightenment. The cake was fresh, conveyed to the table in a highly polished brass dish that cast back the golden highlights in the cake while twinkling a merry pastry greeting all its own.

Offered a choice of five rums to be poured over the top, I selected the dark 1984 vintage Rhum JM from Martinique. Then the waiter held aloft a gigantic dollop of whipped cream and asked if I wished it or not.

When my delighted laugh rose to a near-cackle, he said, “It was only a question.”

Following the dessert course came the petits fours, pastries, and candies. There were thirty-five. I ate ten or twelve, hoping my inadequate consumption would not be perceived by the kitchen staff as an insult. I shoved a few of the wrapped caramels in my pocket to eat later.

I have never been certain what purpose petits fours serve, for at this point in the meal no further nutrition is required. In fact, the presentation of these tiny sweets depresses me, because I feel I must consume every one of them or be responsible for havoc in the notoriously demanding French kitchen—some junior member of the pastry brigade de-toqued and banished to a bakery in the Massif Central to make cupcakes for the rest of his life.

Petits fours have yet another drawback. Although they are ostensi-bly complimentary, they increase the cost of a three-star meal, because serving them calls for an enormous investment in trays, bowls, baskets, jars, urns, tureens, and pots for transporting all the chocolates, caramels, marshmallows, madeleines, macaroons, and bonbons. I am certain the price of eighteenth-century sterling silver has been driven up by three-star chefs bidding against one another at auction houses just so hard-candy can be brought to the table with proper ceremony.

After the meal, I informed Cerutti that he had not lived up to 7 4

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Ducasse’s promise to feed me prudently. He replied that he considered the meal light, for he had given me only a small portion of the fish and one dessert instead of two. He used my selfless petit four consumption against me, claiming they were the reason I felt so full. He shook his finger at me and said from then on I could have only a single petit four with every meal, and he ignored my reasonable protest that a chef who wished a customer to have only one petit four would not serve thirty-five of them.

With dinner only four hours away, I returned to my room to nap, which I find the only civilized restoration between meals. I do not understand people who walk after eating, which is not all that different from swimming, which is considered suicidal. Anyway, why walk at a time when you have no interest in peering into the windows of charcuteries and patisseries?

I fell asleep on my couch, but I had eaten too much to rest well.

Were I French, I would have had no problems, for overeating comes naturally to them. They even have an imaginary ailment to blame whenever they feel uncomfortable after the courses have mounted up, an imaginary malady they call une crise de foie, a liver attack. Having denounced a perfectly innocent internal organ—J’accuse, as they like to say—the crisis is over and they move on to their next meal. Americans don’t