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

The dining area turned out to be a bedroom where the mattress and the box spring had been raised up and flattened against the wall, Murphy-bed style. A window air conditioner provided ventilation, of sorts. Prices were set in pesos, and forty pesos, the equivalent of two dollars, bought a meal of salad with avocado and impossibly tasty leg of pork. With me at dinner was a forty-nine-year-old scientific researcher F O R K I T O V E R

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with a superb terraced apartment, two children in university, and an unshakable belief in the ideals of the revolution. When I spoke of Cuba’s shortcomings, including racism in the restaurant industry, she shook her head in denial and told me, “You should not look for the spots of the sun but the light that it gives.”

By the last days of my trip, I was surviving on little more than pizza, a bad sign. I had not become one with the restaurants of the country. I sought out the Marina Hemingway’s La Cova Pizza Nova, which proudly declares itself “the People Pleasing Pizza Since 1963.” I hung out at my hotel’s air-conditioned pizza shop, ordering pepperoni pies with Coke, a regression to childhood tastes.

I could no longer take the endless heat or the relentless red snapper. One day, shortly after noon, I was standing on a corner in Vedado, an upscale residential district of Havana, wondering where I could possibly go for lunch, when I received a sign. It was not a spiritual or a meta-physical sign. It was a real sign. I was standing in the shade of a banyan tree when an old man stepped in front of me and hammered a sign into the trunk of the tree. It read pizza, and it had an arrow pointing up the block.

Sure enough, two houses away I found another sign, this one reading pizza exquisita. In the driveway was a tiny stand offering homemade pizza for six pesos, or thirty cents. The establishment seated one, on a broken-backed rusted iron chair, and the pizza looked like one of those individual-size pan pies sold in American airports.

They aren’t so good. This one was worse. The red sauce was bitter, and I don’t believe the cheese was really cheese. I nodded my thanks to the proprietor and explained that I would be on my way, eating my pizza as I strolled. As soon as I rounded the corner, I tossed it in a pile of uncollected garbage. I understood then what I should have much earlier, that there would be no hope for the cuisine of Cuba as long as a desperate need for money was the only reason why people cooked.

GQ, december 1999

T O R O ! T O R O ! T O R O !

I do not often go to the mountaintop, seeking the way. I’m not that spiritual, or that fond of exercise. But after spending several harrowing days in Los Angeles, the land of dancing sushi chefs and “oy vey salmon sushi,” I found myself soliciting the soothing company of masters, men who can find meaning in a single grain of rice.

Phillip Yi, vice president of the California Sushi Academy in Venice—

where some rogue meat-eater had spraypainted fuck sushi on the front door—spoke to me of a venerated chef in Japan who molds his sushi so exquisitely that the number of grains of rice in each piece never varies by more than three or four.

Nobu Kusuhara, chef-owner of Sushi Sasabune in West L.A., talked about his Edo style of sushi, the serving of cool fish on warm balls of loose rice. He said the Edo style was almost forgotten, but Japanese customers in their eighties remembered it from when they were children in Tokyo.

In southern California, a visitor can learn much that is right about sushi and experience almost everything that is wrong.

I am by no means a sushi ignoramus, even though I come from Euro-centric New York, not Pan-Asian Los Angeles. I know not to turn my little dish of soy (almost always lite soy in L.A.) into an off-brown sludge by stirring in gobs of wasabi (Japanese horseradish). I know to dip a little corner of the fish, but not the rice, into the soy if I wish to accent the flavor. I know it is permissible to use your fingers to eat 1 2 6

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sushi but never sashimi, which is unadorned raw fish. I know it is acceptable to order tuna and cucumber rolls, which are eaten in Japan, but no others. While I was in California, the words California roll never passed my lips.

Still, I was experiencing difficulties grasping all the complexities of sushi, even at Kusuhara’s sensible Sushi Sasabune. Captivating as I found the establishment, his undisciplined little balls of rice were falling apart in my hand before I could get around to a second bite.

Contrary to custom, I do not eat my sushi in one bite. I take two, or sometimes, in a demonstration of Occidental defiance, three. Kusuhara slowly shook his head and pronounced my sushi eating unacceptable.

“When you put the sushi in your mouth,” he said, “you must close your eyes and feel the warm rice fall away, and then you bite into the fish.” He said my style of eating was creating tension in my mind. “When you have two bites, your mind is not concentrating on tasting the fish.

You are worrying about messing up the table.” I nodded, bowed imperceptibly, and backed away.

To most of us, sushi is raw fish painted with wasabi and served on vinegared rice. In L.A., it can be anything. The proliferation of sushi restaurants in southern California began in the early 1980s, about the time the television miniseries Shogun glamorized feudal Japanese society. That was also the beginning