Book Review: The Man Who Ate the World

Disclaimer: The folks at Holt send me review copies. I don’t always love the books, but I love getting them.

I don’t know what millefeuille is. Or veloute. Or charcroute. This tells you how much I know about fancy cooking. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat that weird food that’s made by chemistry – foams and dry ice and vacuum sealing and the like don’t interest me, not enough to pay for them, that’s for sure. But I love to cook and, as the scale will confirm, I also love to eat. So it was with a hefty portion of envy that I digested Jay Rayner’s new book The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner

I think I’d like Jay Rayner. Like Anthony Bourdain, he’s acutely aware of the good fortune he has in his line of work. He eats dinner and gets paid to do so. But he’s got none of Bourdain’s macho edge. There’s a funny scene in the book where Rayner and Bourdain are both at  Tokyo’s infamous fish market, and Rayner makes Bourdain’s crew out for something closely resembling a motorcycle gang. But that’s not what the book is about.

The Man Who Ate the World is about Rayner’s quest for the perfect meal. He seeks the Olympus of dinners in high end restaurants around the world – Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, New York, London, and Paris. On the way he experiences opulence, gets lost, gets sick, eats some stuff that’s just plain nasty, and, perhaps most shocking of all, finds he is not hungry.

Reading straight descriptions of food isn’t all that interesting to me but reading Rayner’s reaction to the places is. He writes this bit about a restaurant in Moscow where the food is okay, if a little tame, But the environment? Out of control.

If I were told there were orgies going on in the various anterooms ringing the rotunda,  that the diners were first eating dinner and then one another, perhaps while snorting arm-lengths of cocaine off silver platters proffered by bare chested dwarfs wearing brightly colored turbans, it would all be totally of a piece, and not just because I have a sordid imagination.

After a while, my envy for Rayner’s project faded a little. Typically, I crack a book where the authors goes off around the world in pursuit of something and I think, “Dammit! That should be me!” But I don’t feel that way. Rayner makes the work of food critic sound like just that – work. Not in a “your job sucks” kind of way, but in a way that makes it clear that it’s work, in spite of the glam venues and big ticket meals.

I’ve eaten two very expensive meals in the last six months. We’re talking 175 a head. I was a guest for both. One was at Chef Mavro’s in Honolulu where we were served the eight(?) course tasting menu – a series of small plates paired with wine. It was Hawaii Regional Cuisine, a style that uses local ingredients and reinterprets them in the chef’s style. It was outstanding stuff, you could taste the food in different parts of your mouth at once and the combinations were… let’s just say that those were the best scallops I’ve ever had. When J talks about that meal, he gets a little blush and compares it to fireworks.

The other was at the Barking Frog in Woodinville, not far from Seattle.  I loved the wine, I was nonplussed by the food. The salad was overdressed, the risotto was too salty, the halibut was oddly a little stringy. But the wine was incredible, I have never tasted such lovely wine. It was a preview meal, the local foodies were there and most of them were fawning while my friend and I were, well, it was fine. But for that kind of bank, it’s got to bet a lot better than fine, even if you’re not paying.

Jay Rayner eats like that all the time, shelling out shocking amounts of cash for dinner, topping out at nearly 2000 dollars for a meal in a Paris restaurant. It’s insane, really.  But oddly, at no point did I dislike him for this. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it’s because it’s so clear how much he loves to eat good food. Maybe it’s because his writing captures the work of being a critic in a way I’ve not seen before.

There’s something missing from the premise in this book, though. In the search for the “perfect meal” Rayner goes all out on the top end. But when I think about it, the perfect meal is seldom one where I’m surrounded by pretense and waiters. When I think about food that’s made me really, really happy, I almost always end up on the downscale end of things. That Vietnamese guy that made the best mango smoothies in Honolulu’s Chinatown.  The spicy soup up at the Moonlight Cafe on Jackson Street. Oh, oh, oh, those fried artichoke hearts at the roadside stand outside Gilroy, California – we ate two baskets sitting in the car with the doors open. Down the road from me, you can get a big bowl of pozole for about six bucks – it’s enough for two people, really, and you can eat it in a place that used to be a Taco Bell, while sitting in a plastic booth surrounded by people who mostly speak Spanish. I love that place.

What’s the perfect meal, anyway?