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

from Nice, went off to hotel cooking school, and eventually began working in hotel kitchens, preparing those fraudulent French luxury dishes that sound more interesting than they ever taste—dishes with the surnames of courte-sans, like lamb pompadour; dishes that take on the names of regions, like sole normande; dishes that have names meant to impress tourists, where the peas are Saint-Germain and the asparagus is Argenteuil. “I was getting bored,” he said. “I felt that if this was what cooking was all about, I would change jobs.” Then he met, in succession, Jacques Maximin, of the Hotel Negresco in Nice, and the younger and even more brilliant Ducasse. Cerutti kept going back and forth between the two, working for one and then the other. Ducasse found the situation amusing but Maximin hated it, always saying to him, “I never want to see you again.” He cooked in Florence, and he had that restaurant in Nice, and when Ducasse asked him to work in Monte Carlo, he accepted. Ducasse says of his second-in-command, the man who executes the recipes that have made him the most famous chef in the world, “Franck would be unable to cook the kind of food we have in Paris, but he is the best interpreter of Mediterranean food there is. There is a strong relationship between what he is and what he does. He is a Latin. He must touch the products before he cooks them. He has olive oil instead of blood.” Although Monaco has no noticeable native cuisine, one evening Cerutti sent out an amuse-bouche called a Barbajuan, a fried puff pastry filled with Swiss chard, ricotta cheese, and leeks. It is a specialty of the principality. Because it was served in this restaurant, I found it tasty, but I can see how it might remind me of a frozen pizza 7 8

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roll somewhere else. Monaco does not have much of a native population, either, most of the locals having fled to escape the income-tax refugees pouring over the border in their Rolls-Royces. That same evening, a true Monegasque and his wife entered the dining room, moving with the elegance and pride of an endangered species. They were both in their heavy-spending years.

They set their handbags on the tiny settee placed beside every cushioned armchair for that purpose. She wore the sort of jewels Harry Winston lends out to starlets who try not to return them. He wore a diamond-studded pin on his velvet jacket and a pinkie ring with a sap-phire so large it caught my eye from two tables away. Everything about him sparkled, including his hair. He bent to read the wine list with the aid of a lorgnette, reading glasses that come on a stem. They seemed happy together. If he was one of those men who keep mistresses, he loved his wife as much as any of them. They had beluga caviar and Gos-set Rosé Champagne, and then he ordered 1983 La Mission Haut-Brion, a very nice wine, not too showy, just right.

I was eating alone, as I often do, and their mutual devotion caused me a moment of melancholy. I got over it quickly. There were decisions to be made: Which Champagne-by-the-glass would I have to begin?

Which of the seven breads would I select? Did I desire the salted butter from Normandy in the gold dish or the unsalted butter from Normandy in the cute little basket? (What a relief not to have to dip my bread in olive oil, mandatory in the Mediterranean restaurants of New York.) I find that the more culinary dilemmas I face in the course of a meal, the happier I am to be sitting by myself. Without conversation, there is nothing to get in the way of the food.

When I am dining alone, I do not take out a paperback novel. I find that restaurants provide all the visual entertainment I need. I find I must occasionally resist the impulse to engage sommeliers in tedious, one-sided discourses on the greatness of the wines I have had back home, a particular Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley, for example. I know I have gone too far when the sommelier is shaking with impatience, desperate to break away.

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To my knowledge, I did that only once at Le Louis XV, when the chief sommelier, Noel Bajor, served a 1988 Coulée de Serrant and I tried to express my gratitude with a heartfelt discourse on the superiority of French Chenin Blanc over California Chenin Blanc. While I was speaking, I believe several customers fell from their chairs, fatally parched.

Cerutti and I settled into an agreeable if quarrelsome pattern. I would inform him that he was giving me too much to eat, and he would dis-pute this, claiming that it was my fault for eating too fast or eating too much bread or eating too many petits fours. Occasionally he would waggle a finger at me and say, “No cheese!” The maître d’ of the restaurant was continually trying to brighten my mood, announcing cheerily, “Very light today, only two courses.” Then out would come food on plates so large they appeared seaworthy. One of the “very light today” meals started with the signature dish of the restaurant: zucchini, turnips, fennel, carrots, and cabbage cooked with olive oil and black truffles. The baby vegetables in this assemblage were soft and impossibly succulent, bound up with the chopped truffles and olive oil. The dish was so savory I could imagine never needing meat again. It was also so oversize I could imagine never eating again.

Next came veal, and never before had I tasted veal this tender and yet this flavorful, slice after slice of delicately pink loin, so many slices this was no mere dish of veal. This was a vista of veal, veal that seemed to