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

go on forever, fading into the horizon, and surrounding the veal were spinach-flecked potato gnocchi in a black truffle sauce. Cerutti came out and applied the coup de grâce, shaving black truffles over the dish. I ate every bite of the best vegetables I’d ever had in my life, and then I ate every bite of the best veal I’d ever had in my life, and then I stumbled into the kitchen, barely able to remain upright.

This was the showdown. With whatever formality I was able to muster, I informed Cerutti that he had let me down. Much to my surprise, he expressed his regret. He said the veal had to be cooked for two, and what else was he to do inasmuch as I was eating alone but give me both portions.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

This did not prevent him from presenting me with dessert. Out came mascarpone sorbet with wild strawberries. I counted the strawberries, and there were forty-six of them. I let Cerutti know about this, too, and he walked away, shaking his head, muttering, “Forty-six, forty-six,” as though I were the one who had lost his senses, not he. I ate every one of the barely warmed berries with the cooling sorbet. I did it to prove to Cerutti that he could not get the better of me.

What I did not want him to know, for it would have altered our quarrelsome relationship, was that never had I experienced food of such clarity prepared so exquisitely. There were no tomatoes, except a few that had been sun-dried, and barely any olives. I could have done with fewer artichokes, but Cerutti explained that I had come during the season of the wonderful Sardinian artichokes, and nobody could have too many of those.

He served Mediterranean fish soup at one meal. It smelled sweetly of the sea, and accompanying it was rouille, which is the traditional spicy, garlicky, reddish sauce. I was relieved when Cerutti told me I need not stir the rouille into the broth. All my life I have been ruining perfectly good fish soup out of an obligation to add ridiculous amounts of sauce to it, and now I don’t ever have to do that again. I had turbot on a layer of crabmeat, and accompanying the fish were grilled endive and raw endive stuffed with crabmeat, an example of the reiteration of flavors that is characteristic of Ducasse’s style. The simplest food served to me was spit-roasted leg of lamb, the best I’ve ever tasted. The most unexpected was the stomach of a codfish, prepared like tripe, a daring dish for a three-star restaurant. The only food I truly disliked were the marshmallows, a part of the petit four collection. They smelled like dried flowers in the drawing room of a widowed aunt. I told Cerutti they’d only please me if he built a campfire in the center of the dining room and allowed me to roast them on sticks.

I was right about the limitations of Mediterranean restaurants in America. Ducasse sided with me on this point, if on no other. He said Mediterranean food becomes less authentic the farther it moves from the F O R K I T O V E R

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Mediterranean, which makes it “enormously difficult” to do in Paris and

“a caricature” in the United States. I was surprised to discover that Le Louis XV is actually a regional restaurant—not a humble one, but a regional restaurant nonetheless. Eating the Mediterranean food there gave me the same good feeling I might have experienced had I stumbled upon an unknown bistro in Nice with a genius for a cook.

As for Cerutti, I owe him an apology. After leaving Monte Carlo, I flew to Paris for the promised dinner at Alain Ducasse, where the style of food is less homey but otherwise similar to that of Le Louis XV.

Nothing seemed very different until the dishes were cleared away and it came time for the petits fours.

They did not arrive, as they did at Le Louis XV, on an assortment of splendid plates. They came on a polished cart the size of a resupply wagon. On this conveyance were vanilla ice cream, strawberry sorbet, roasted almonds dipped in chocolate powder, sugar tarts, Paris-Brest (an exquisite pastry honoring an old bicycle race), apricots dipped in sugar, raspberries dipped in sugar, preserved orange dipped in chocolate, chocolates with nuts and dried fruit, marshmallows, two kinds of macaroons, four kinds of bonbons, and warm madeleines.

I do not forgive Cerutti his indifference to portion control, but in the matter of petits fours, I realize that he is not such an unreasonable fellow after all.

GQ, may 1999

P L A Y I T A G A I N , L A M

I’m going to be honest with you. Where war is concerned, few people are. I’m going to tell you a story about Vietnam unlike any you’ve read before.

Nobody dies in my story. I served in the Republic of South Vietnam a quarter-century ago as the executive officer of a U.S. Army boat company, and I don’t know anybody who was killed in the war. Whenever I think that life hasn’t given me a break, I remember that.

There’s something else I should confess about my year in Vietnam: I gained weight while I was there.

I was a captain, a deskbound Transportation Corps officer assigned to the U.S. Army Harbor Craft Company (Provisional) in Saigon. At the time, it was the largest boat company in the army. Yes, the army has boats, lots of them: tugs, floating cranes, tankers, landing craft, barges, and more.

You hear a lot these days about “good” wars and “bad” wars, but I’ve always suspected mine was the third kind, an unexceptional war.

When I went to the Washington National Records Center, in Maryland, to look for information about my unit, nobody could find any evidence in