Garlic and Sapphires (36 page)

The Missionary of the Delicious

T
he moment the waiter appears with the chef's standard offering, a little plate of toast topped with dull whipped pâté, it becomes clear that the meal is not going to be brilliant. And from the cottony bread to the dreary dessert, the kitchen rarely exceeds these expectations.”

That was Capsouto Frères.

At Palio, I reported, the gnocchetti were gummy, the lobster drowned in an excruciating sauce. Il Postino's kichen door, I said, “bangs against the wall with such force and regularity it feels like an earthquake.” I complained about the restaurant's prices, savaged the food, and ended the review like this: “It's hard to smile when you feel like a sucker.”

“You're certainly in a foul mood,” said Carol. “I can't remember the last time you wrote something that made me want to go out to eat. Is it you or the restaurants? Suddenly you seem to hate everything.”

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” I said.

But it was not true. During the winter of 1997, as I ate my way through one forgettable restaurant after another, the woman in the mirror Michael had held up was very much on my mind. For the past few years I had been staring at the images of Molly, Brenda, Betty, and Chloe, but it had been a long time since I had taken a good look at myself. Now I began to wonder if the disguises had turned into more than merely part of my job. Was I pretending to be other people because I no longer liked the person I had become?

“I read you religiously,” strangers often said when I told them my name, and I'd smile modestly and murmur something polite. But when people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think that you deserve it. I had started my career at the
Times
by insisting that there was no right or wrong in matters of taste. Did I still believe that, or had I turned into a fatuous food snob, one of those people who thought my own opinion was the truth?

Self-doubt may be healthy, but it is hell on critics. The more I thought these things, the more difficult my work became. I went to the office every day and sat at my computer, staring at the keyboard, willing the words to come. Stubbornly they stayed away. You could read it in my reviews: those that weren't mean were dull.

Going home didn't help. Michael had started working on a piece about the Rocky Flats weapons plant, and every night he came home with new information about nuclear nightmares. What if a suicide terrorist managed to enter the facility, barricade himself inside, and build a bomb? “It could take out a few states,” Michael said grimly. Three worried whistle blowers had called him, so concerned about security that they wanted someone to
do something
about the situation. I eavesdropped as Michael huddled over the phone late into the night, listening to doomsday scenarios. And then I listened some more as he practiced the dark art of the investigative reporter, convincing these men to act against their own best interests. They wanted to be anonymous, and Michael had to persuade them to go on national television and tell their story; if they wouldn't do it, he said, the situation would continue unchecked. Night after night I listened as Michael slowly drew them into his confidence, talking them into doing the right thing.

“Will they lose their jobs when this airs?” I asked.

“Most likely,” he replied.

On the phone he sounded completely confident, but he tossed and turned in bed, waking us both up with his nightmares. Awake or asleep, at home or in the office, nothing seemed to be going right. If Jean-Georges Vongerichten had not chosen to open his restaurant at that precise moment, I don't know what I would have done.

Vongerichten was a media darling. At Lafayette he had become famous for replacing butter and cream with concentrated fruit and vegetable juices. His Vong was New York's first experiment in upscale Asian fusion, and his bistro Jo Jo, despite being too small, too expensive, and incredibly uncomfortable, was constantly packed. For my taste his newest venture had already garnered far too much advance press. Long before it opened, all of New York knew that he had employed a private forager to root out unusual wild herbs, and every aspect of Adam Tihany's design had been written about in agonizing detail. Jean-Georges also had the misfortune to be located in the appalling Trump building, a peacock unashamedly spreading its flamboyant tail across the foot of Central Park. To say I did not expect to like the place would be an understatement.

“My first visit's today at lunch,” I told Carol in late spring. “Want to come?”

“Some other time,” she said, “My stomach's sort of bothering me.”

“You?” I said. “You're never sick.”

“I don't think it's anything serious,” she replied. “But I'm going to the doctor. I'd feel so foolish if I had something and I'd ignored it.” She peered at my face and added, “Stop looking like that. It's probably nothing. But if we learned nothing else from AIDS, it's that when your body talks it's wise to listen.”

“Oh well,” I said, going off to the ladies' room to make a half-hearted attempt at disguising myself, “I doubt that you're missing much.”

In the bathroom I pulled a nondescript ash-colored wig and a pair of glasses out of my briefcase. I put on a plain gray dress. “You don't actually think you're going to fool anyone in that getup?” said Carol when I emerged. “Any idiot can tell that you're wearing a wig.”

“I know,” I said, “but I don't have the energy for this. I haven't even given this one a name.”

“What credit card are you using?” she asked.

“Toni Newman,” I said. “I just got it. Toni's short for Antoinette.”

“Well,
be
Toni,” she said. “Make an effort. At least go put some lipstick on.”

I went reluctantly back to the bathroom and worked on my face. I put a little wisp of a hat over the wig. “Better,” said Carol when I reemerged, “but far from fabulous.”

Walking to the subway, I tried to imagine who this Toni might be. An unmarried woman who worked in advertising? That would do. I considered her life and decided that she was in the throes of a middle-aged mid-career crisis, trying to figure out whether it was time to quit her job and move on.

As the subway came roaring into the station it occurred to me that any sane person would want to live somewhere quieter, prettier, less stressful. Maybe Toni was going to use her life savings to open a bakery in some clean little New England town, or someplace warm and friendly like Berkeley.

I was still lost in this dream as I climbed out of the subway, up from the subterranean noise and grime into the open space of Columbus Circle. The sky was blue and as I mounted the steps to the restaurant, Trump's gaudy brass doors flashed in the sunlight. They glided silently open and I walked in. Two pairs of eyes looked up simultaneously, surveying me from behind a desk. The skinny young woman examined me dubiously, swinging her long black hair suspiciously back from her shoulder as my hand went to the wig in an involuntary, self-conscious motion. I said Toni's name and the woman hesitated, searching in her book, reluctant to allow me access to the restaurant. But while she was considering her next move the glamorous black man came gliding around the desk and started to lead me into the dining room. She made a motion, as if to protest, but he stilled her. “Right this way,” he said, executing a little bow.

The dining room opened into a whoosh of cool light that had a clean, severe purity. It was so churchlike that I found myself sniffing, half expecting the smell of old stones and melting wax. But this was a different aroma—wild leaves and red wine with hints of hazelnuts, and somewhere, deep in the background, peppered caramel. There were tropical notes too, as if a gentle rain had wafted through the room, leaving behind the promise of coconut palms and mango trees. As I followed the maître d' I inhaled so deeply that by the time I sank into my seat I was intoxicated and the deep purple anemones in the vase seemed to stretch toward me, nodding their velvet heads in welcome.

I ordered the tasting menu, and when the sommelier offered to bring appropriate wines for each course, I thought, Why not? The first wine arrived and I took a sip, holding the cool pale liquid in my mouth until I could feel the weight of the sugar on my tongue. I let it run down the back of my throat, appreciating its smoothness, and wriggled into my chair.

“A little
amuse bouche
as a gift from the chef,” murmured the waiter, setting down a minuscule porcini tart framed by a delicate salad of tiny herbs. I ate slowly, first the lacy licorice-flavored chervil, then sturdy, spicy wild parsley, and finally the aggressive little fronds of dill. Poring through them I discovered a single leaf of lamb's quarter, bits of sorrel, dandelion, chickweed. I followed the flavors in my mind until the walls vanished and I emerged into a deep glade that grew more distinct with each bite.

It was disappointing to come out of the woods, and for a moment I resented the luxurious modern room and the city visible beyond the windows. Then the waiter set a bowl of tiny lavender blossoms at my place and once again I forgot where I was. He dipped a ladle into a tureen and spilled the contents into the bowl, releasing a torrent of garlic that cascaded, a waterfall of scent, just beneath my nose. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, taking in the round sweetness of the garlic, the sharp mintiness of chives, and then, something else. What? I opened my eyes to find that the waiter had set a little plate of sautéed frog's legs on the table.

The soup was not like anything I'd tried before—garlic gone green, racy, oddly elegant. The chive blossoms rang out sharply when you took the first bite and then began to fade, teasing, until you took another.

I inhaled the soup, ate the frog's legs with my fingers, dreamily tearing them with my teeth and dabbling my fingers in the lemon-laden bowl of luxuriously warm water.

All around me waiters were carving ducks fragrant with five-spice powder and drizzling caramel sauce over slices of poached foie gras. They were spooning creamed morels over asparagus the color of newly sprouted grass and dolloping roasted apricot tarts with just-churned ice cream. The smells swirled around me; in this symphony of scent I felt as if I were smelling with my skin. My body began to tingle, as if I had been frozen and was now, slowly, starting to thaw.

The sommelier offered glasses of icy Gewürztraminer that smelled like perfumed blossoms until you took a sip and discovered the elegantly astringent flavor. In front of me the waiter was covering a plate with a pristine square of halibut, blinding in its whiteness, and strewing pure red tomato confit on one side, pale green ribbons of zucchini on the other. The sauce, with its nutlike aroma, was the color of faded golden taffeta. “Château-Chalon,” he whispered and I thought yes, only the Jura wine, dried on beds of straw, could have this jeweled fragrance.

Dessert was a shower of treats descending slowly on the table. First a chocolate napoleon of such restrained sweetness that it formed a bridge to the warm raspberries and vanilla cream that followed. Next a dense confit of apples, laden with orange peel. Then homemade marshmal lows, great rolls of them cut with scissors, and candied shiso, and little macaroons in a box.

I had fooled no one in that disguise, but it was worth it; after that, everything tasted better to me. The following week I stumbled into a sweet little Neapolitan restaurant, Da Rosa, where the owner's mother stood in the kitchen turning out hand-made ribbons of pasta and fluffy little gnocchi while he lovingly poured one local wine after another, extolling the virtues of ancient grapes like Aglianico. I went to Canal House and rediscovered the joy of macaroni and cheese when it has enough crust. Maya opened, and I was suddenly excited about the possibility of great Mexican food. Then came Molyvos, where I ate dolmades and tyro pites and grilled fish, remembering what it was like to sit on a hillside in Crete with the oregano-scented breezes blowing across your face as you looked at the wine-dark sea down below. It was a wonderful few months.

“You're on a roll,” said Carol. “You're fun to read again.”

“Everything's better,” I said. “Michael's in a great mood. He and Rita Braver went out to Rocky Flats and got some great video. The whistle blowers are going on air and Dan Rather loves the piece. It's going to be important. And I'm about to review a new restaurant opened by an incredibly talented young chef.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Rocco DiSpirito,” I said. “The food he served at his last place, Dava, was amazing. The new one's Union Pacific; you have to come with me.”

“Maybe after the operation,” she replied.

“Operation?” I cried. “What operation?”

“It's nothing,” she said. “But you know these stomach problems I've been having?”

“Yes?” I said.

“They've decided it's probably endometriosis. They're going to take a look. I'll only be out a couple of days. Really, it's nothing.”

“Okay,” I said. “When you get back we'll celebrate at Union Pacific.”

 

 

 

 

 

T
he celebration had to be postponed: Carol had ovarian cancer. She refused to be gloomy about it. “I'm going to beat this,” she said as she started on the first round of chemotherapy. “My doctor thinks my chances are excellent. And I've been researching this new treatment they've been doing in California. I'm going to be fine.”

She was so convincing that I stopped worrying. But I missed her deeply. In the office or out, Carol was fun. She was also the only person I knew willing to go out on the spur of the moment, the only one who didn't care if I took her to a big-deal meal or some little dump around the corner. After she left the paper, everything changed.