Bourdain, Ripert, And Me

It always gives me a sense of relief to hear from someone else, that they, and maybe their family, watch Anthony Bourdain’s TV shows as frequently as I and my family do. It’s been about a year and a half since his death and I can’t begin to count the number of times that we’ve watched our favorite episodes of Parts Unknown, although my wife and older son and I (our younger son, currently in his first year in college, is not a particularly rabid fan, although when home he still tolerates our tendency to watch an episode almost daily) don’t always agree on the particular episode. Spouse and offspring tend to want to branch out into the less-food-centric, more politically oriented episodes, while I often stubbornly dig my heels in and make us watch the episode with Masa Takayama for the hundredth or thousandth time (I’ve seen it so often that I generally make the same remarks at the same places in the show, too, as if I were watching a Japan-centric, food-obsessed version of The Rocky Horror Show.)

Despite the voracity with which I’ve consumed his TV shows, and his first two books – both Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour have gotten me through more than one trayful of airplane food, for one thing – I’d never gotten around to reading any of his other work until a few days ago, when I bought copies of Medium Raw and The Nasty Bits. The former has a chapter in it, in which he talks about something I’ve often thought about a lot, which is the idea that having fun in a restaurant, and how you feel after a meal, ought to be a part of how you analyze how you feel about the restaurant, and the cooking, and whether the whole thing was in any sense, worth it.

I’ve never been what I’d think of as a foodie, but food and thinking about food have always been a pretty big part of my life; my mother was Filipino, which meant she was born into a culture that is unapologetically food-obsessed. When I was a young boy, growing up in central Pennsylvania in the 1960s and early 1970s, I remember her encouraging me and my brother and sister, to notice and care about what we were eating and how it was cooked, in a way that it gradually became clear to me, a lot of my friends were not. She was fascinated by French food and French technique, clipped recipes from the New York Times on a regular basis, knew who Craig Claiborne was, and for special occasions like Christmas, she would pull out all the stops and make incredibly difficult things like croquembouche, which came out of her kitchen as a tower of pastry puffs filled with pastry cream and held together by a crackling glaze of caramel.

It was, you might say, a statement piece, and the statement was that food was something worth enjoying both intellectually and sensually. I don’t think you can encounter that preparation of croquembouche without it making you pause to reflect at least to some degree, but in central PA in the 1960s, it was a real show-stopper; I never saw her making it, and never ate it, without wondering where the hell such a thing could possibly come from.

It turned out that it comes from France, of course, and my mother’s cooking was an introduction to not just French cuisine, but French culture, which I’ve more or less loved ever since. First loves aren’t easily forgotten and despite having been able to have amazing meals pretty much all over the world at this point, there is now and will probably always be a part of me which feels, rationally or not, that there’s French cuisine, and then there’s everything else.

Like a lot of folks who at one point worked in restaurants, I loved Kitchen Confidential. My first real job, at fifteen and sixteen, was in a restaurant in Rhode Island, where I’d gone to live with my father after my mother decided she wanted to return to New York – and it was very much an incarnation of the piratical environment Bourdain described in his memoir. It was an all-you-can-eat lobster buffet restaurant, with a couple of hundred seats, on the summer tour-bus route, and I was the lobster boiler.

It took a bit of muscle. The entire job consisted of going to the walk-in cooler (there were two; one for lobster, and one for everything else) with a boat hook; running the hook into a 100 pound crate of live, dripping-wet lobsters; dragging the crate across the concrete kitchen floor to an 80 gallon Hobart kettle sitting over a giant gas ring; and then lifting up the crate and dumping its contents in. It took a few minutes before everyone who’d been greenly alive shortly before, had floated to the top, rigid and red, and then I’d scoop the lobsters out with a two foot wide net on the end of a steel pole, arrange them in buffet table pans, and run them down a narrow, dark flight of wet, crumbling wooden steps, lit from above by a single anemic yellow bulb, to the below-ground-level buffet table. As I had argued with my father shortly after getting the job, moved out, and was paying rent on an efficiency apartment in a motel up the highway, there was not much money left for food, so I ate a great deal of purloined lobster that year (the lobster simply moved too fast for the manager to inventory them accurately, and it was easier to purloin than the pre-cut sirloins, which were counted before and after every shift as if they were gold bars at Fort Knox). There was no finesse in those stolen feasts, but everything tasted good because I was always hungry, and because the lobster was so fresh and good anyway.

Working as both a cook and a waiter, after graduating from college and moving to New York, cured me of any notion of wanting to do it as a real profession, although it did not cure me of loving good food and looking out for anything unusual or interesting any time I got the chance. My current job, which is writing about watches (and about other things whenever I get the chance) has some nice perks and one of the most visible and most obvious, is that I get to travel a fair bit, and often, to eat good meals at reputable and sometimes famous restaurants.

This has been over the last ten or twelve years or so, and in that time my feelings about food and cooking and restaurants have changed a bit. I began to notice, as time went by, that it was possible to eat at a restaurant where the food was cooked with irreproachable technique, and presented in an environment whose luxuriousness matched the expense of the food and wine, without actually enjoying it very much and indeed, sometimes not enjoying it at all. One night in California a few years ago, I ate for the one and only time I’ve ever been there, at French Laundry. I enjoyed it a lot, albeit a good part of the pleasure was anthropological interest; the next night we ate dinner at another restaurant with an elaborate, multi-course tasting menu which fell very flat. Probably any restaurant you try the day after eating at French Laundry is going to suffer by comparison and I don’t mean to be unfair – certainly, the timing was not on its side and we would have been much better off having something dramatically different, like an open-pit pig roast, or hot dogs, or really, anything that wasn’t also an elaborate, multi-course tasting menu. But it was certainly quite interesting to see the same general approach, succeed one night and then fail the next.

I think it was at that point that I began to actively dread the idea of quote fine dining unquote. It began, as a general enterprise, to seem far too inward-looking, certainly far too expensive for the actual pleasure afforded, and also much more about intellectual rather than sensual satisfaction – to paraphrase something Pete Wells once wrote, such restaurants seemed increasingly to me, to want to be admired rather than enjoyed. By then, Parts Unknown had already been on the air for some time – the show’s first episode was in 2013 – and I think part of its appeal for me was the persistent message that a really enjoyable meal, much of the time – maybe most of the time – didn’t have all that much to do with any conventional notion of refinement.

Then, something happened a few months ago that changed my mind very much on the subject, which was a dinner, for the first time, at Le Bernardin. It might be the world’s best-known Michelin 3-star restaurant, partly thanks to Eric Ripert’s exposure on Parts Unknown as the voice-of-reason counterpoint to Bourdain’s self-proclaimed embrace of excess, but it obviously has its own reputation, apart from that, as one of the last great old-school temples of gastronomy on earth. Moreover it is a place where the cooking is often said to not just honor the past, nor rely only on technical excellence – it is supposed to be a place where “innovative cooking” (a phrase it is impossible to hear these days without rolling your eyes) still actually means something.

I went with my wife and older son, both of whom knew exactly who Eric Ripert is and who were hoping against hope to actually see him in the dining room. In the event, he’d heard we were going to be there through the kind offices of a mutual friend who had arranged the reservation for us on fairly short notice, and he actually came out to say hello. I would like to say that I was urbanely calm about the whole thing, but the fact is I think I was even more excited than the family – now, I am sure that you do not get three Michelin stars on a regular basis by being a pushover but in person he was the absolute antithesis of the stereotype of the celebrity chef. I went back to the table after yes, a selfie by the bar, feeling reassured that come what may when the food began to arrive, at least I had encountered a celebrity, whom I’d been genuinely excited to meet, who was almost implausibly pleasant in person. That is to say, if being able to meet him was the high point of the evening, and not the food, I would have been both unsurprised and perfectly satisfied.

Which is part of the reason, I think, I found the food so startling. The first thing that came out was a group of amuse-bouches, which were arranged on a multi-level plate. The first thing I ate was a whole oyster and I was so surprised by the flavor that I actually put my head in my hands and closed my eyes while chewing and swallowing.

I have eaten probably hundreds of oysters at this point, and up until that point, I would have asserted with absolute doctrinaire finality that the best way to enjoy an oyster, is alive and raw out of the shell. It’s not that you can’t make delicious and enjoyable dishes with cooked oysters; obviously you can, but the best way, I would have said, to enjoy an oyster as an oyster would always, and must always be, raw and cold. The funny thing about Ripert’s oyster amuse bouche was that it seemed to do something I would have thought impossible, and it is not as simple as to say that it tasted better than a raw oyster. I read M. F. K. Fischer’s Consider The Oyster for the first time when I was about seven, and she at one point uses the phrase, “more purely oyster” to praise an oyster stew. Of course the way an oyster tastes most purely oyster, I would have said, up until that oyster at Le Bernardin, is raw, but the oyster amuse bouche actually tasted more like an oyster, than any oyster could have, eaten on its own.

It is a difficult thing to explain, and I have absolutely no idea how it was done. I have thought many times since of how to get across what it was like – you might for instance, try and say that it was as if, after eating hothouse tomatoes your entire life, you finally had a chance to eat a really good, vine-ripened tomato, but the analogy does not really work because after all, I have had a lot of really wonderful oysters (including some at a restaurant by the ocean in Normandy which I am sure I shall never see again) and this wasn’t like any of them. It was different in kind from even the best imaginable raw oyster – it had undergone, not merely the enhancement of its flavors, but an actual transfiguration into something else, and yet without losing any of its essential character, and moreover the transformation had revealed aspects of its essential character which are necessarily obscure in the original ingredient.

This is cooking as a kind of lapidary art – what you have at the end of cutting a diamond is still the same diamond, of course, but the revelation of the fire that a well-cut diamond can produce from its comparatively dull origins, is a revelation of a potential that is simply not visible in the uncut diamond. It was like that, and I think it must take the same level of imagination and ability to visualize a result that is not only not obvious, but simply invisible in the original raw material, to have produced that oyster amuse bouche, as it is to cut a diamond well.

The whole rest of the meal was in the same vein. Nothing else we ate had quite the shock value of that first bite but every course was in its own way, just as illuminating about the ingredient. On the way back home, in the taxi, the three of us couldn’t stop talking about it – I had forgotten that cooking could ever do what Ripert’s does at Le Bernardin. I am almost afraid to go back now, because of course, it will be a different experience the next time and, also of course, no meal exists outside the context of the health, peace of mind, and appetite of the person eating it. It helped that I was dining with my family, and that they were as excited about it as I was, and that Chef Ripert was so gracious and hospitable in person. But I suspect that clarity, that sense of revelation about the nature of each ingredient, would be the same, even if for some reason I were not capable of being as excited by it.

What made me think of all this and what made me want to write about it, was finishing a chapter in Medium Raw, which is entitled, “It’s Not You, It’s Me.” The chapter begins with an anecdote, about Marco Pierre White railing against multi-course tasting menus in general – railing against being something at which Marco Pierre White notoriously excels – and at a meal he had had at Alinea in particular. The meal in question was, yes, a highly technical multi-course tasting menu. Bourdain talks about his own reaction to Alinea, which was the same, when he went, as White’s (he also goes on to say that his wife, after reading the chapter in draft, went to Alinea herself and found it immensely enjoyable) and then, he goes on to consider what makes a meal, simply put, fun. He writes, “If cooking professionally is about control, eating successfully should be about submission, about easily and without thinking, giving yourself over to whatever dream they’d like you to share. In the best-case scenario, you shouldn’t be intellectualizing what you’re eating while you’re eating it. You shouldn’t be noticing things at all … you shouldn’t be forced to think at all. Only feel.”

The dinner at Le Bernardin was like that – it was so sensually well-orchestrated as to preclude analysis during the experience itself. There were certainly moments, and a lot of them, that made me wonder how in the world the dish I was eating had been made, but this is no more than to say that you wonder how a really good magic trick was done, during a really good magic show – you aren’t analyzing the trick so much as you are experiencing incredulity as wonder. And it made me wonder about what I do for a living, too. Bourdain says elsewhere in the same book that it’s hard to write about food all the time without resorting to cliché, and I think that is obviously true of any specific subject – I am sure that car writers and wine writers and god knows, restaurant critics go through the same thing I do as a specialist in watches (and probably, look forward to writing about something else given the chance, as much as I do as well; my single favorite story to have written this year had nothing to do with watches at all. Given how hard it is to put bread on the table writing for publication these days, I am not complaining but monotony in subject can easily lead to monotony in craft, which is obviously very bad for a writer).

There is a tendency to become, especially if you are writing about a luxury, something of an apologist for high prices, but sometimes, every once in a great while, you run across something that is monumentally expensive but which is so genuinely revelatory that you really do feel like it’s worth it. And as a writer, you can say that – but then you have to figure out how to deal with how you feel about all the excuses you might have made for lesser efforts as well.