In The Man Who Ate the World, Jay Rayner The Observer’s food critic, takes readers on his search for the perfect meal and bring us to some of the most expensive – but not necessarily ones with the best food – restaurants in the world in seven cities: Las Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, New York, London and Paris. Here are some excerpts I’ve gleaned from his book:
Las Vegas
Restaurants: Ergo, Bouchon, Bartolotta, Mesa Grill, Mix (which he hates), Nobu, Lotus of Siam
“It had struck me, as I moved from linen-covered table to linen-covered table, that the success of the new breed of Las Vegas restaurant now lay in its ability to transport you from the city in which it was located to somewhere else entirely, by sheer weight of excess. That dislocation I had experienced so acutely at Bouchon had actually been present at all the places I had eaten. In order to make you think that Las Vegas was now a really sophisticated place, which they had to make you stop thinking about Las Vegas altogether, and they had done so pretty successfully.”
Moscow
Restaurants: Café Pushkin, The Peking, Sirena, Tsar’s Hunt, Sumosan, Turandot
“The restaurants here do not feel like somewhere you go to eat, not even the ones like Tsar’s Hunt where the food can be better than average. They feel like a redoubt, one built against a surfeit of politics and history at the door. In the restaurants of Las Vegas the fantasy was by turns charming and ludicrous, but never sinister. At the end everyone went home. Here, the fantasy restaurants feel necessary, a place of escape and therefore a vital resource for those who can afford them, and that in itself is troubling. No one cares about the food. Just as in Soviet times, they only care that they are part of an elite who can visit them.”
Dubai
Restaurants: Al Mahara, Verre, World Trade Center Club, Indego, Al Nafoorah, City Star Restaurant (located in the poor – an often unseen – part of the city and costing a fraction of the price of the other restaurants visited)
“I realise now that I am still searching for the quintessential Dubai experience, the one that sums up the place in the way the Pushkin, with its mix of play food, sentimentality and sky-high prices, sums up Moscow; but it is difficult to get a handle on this city. Many of the signs are in Arabic. The spoken language is English. Most people are Indian. The food is from everywhere. The restaurant critic is confused.”
Tokyo
Restaurants: Yukimura, Gagnaire, Hiramatsu, Japanese restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental (name not given in book), Tapas Molecular Bar, Okei-Sushi (Rayner loved this restaurant),
“Tokyo’s restaurant world has proved a steep learning curve for me. In other cities I have visited, identifying the top restaurants has been a breeze … In Tokyo nothing is obvious … I had been told stories about tiny high-end places, hidden away in apartment buildings or in the basements of office blocks, serving intricate menus of extraordinary clarity and precision to just four or six people. There were dozens of them. The problem was that I didn’t know any of their names, let alone how to book myself a seat.”
“They [restaurants] are piled on top of each other, like children’s building blocks. They are crammed down the narrow side streets between skyscrapers, squeezed in along the major boulevards, secreted away in both the basements and uppermost floors of department stores. They are everywhere. The vast majority, obviously, are Japanese, and most of them offer just one style of cooking: here a tempura shop, there a sushi joint, over there a ramen bar. In the Japanese restaurant business the specialist is venerated over the generalist.”
New York
In New York, Rayner and celebrity food blogger Steve Plotnicki go on a restaurant crawl of some of New York’s top restaurants in one night. It read like heaps of fun and gastronomic decadence!
Restaurants: Jean-Georges, Per Se, WD-50, Pearl Oyster Bar, Waverly Inn,
“It is nearly 12.30a.m. We have been eating for six hours. It occurs to me that in one night in New York I had managed to experience as much of this city’s restaurant scene as I had in a week in all the other places I had visited. This, it seemed to me, was down to the nature of the trade here. It was adversarial, a battle of wills. Clearly, once Plotnicki had got Jean-Georges and Per Se on board, the others had felt duty-bound to play ball. And then, with the enthusiasm of New Yorkers, they had all bought into it [the restaurant crawl] fully, accepted it more as a happening than dinner. Steve Plotnicki, king of the food bloggers, had turned eating out into a competitive sport. Our only opponent had been ordinariness, and it seemed to me that we had won.”
London
Restaurants: Square, Petrus, Galvin, The Greenhouse, Le Gavroche,
In explaining the bad restaurant food and the lack of regard for good food in Britain: “Both the war and, even more importantly, the nine gruelling years or rationing that followed had left the country with a collective sense that to spend proper money on sustenance was somehow indecent and that the flamboyance and display associated with the ‘Continental’ restaurant – all that setting fire to things! All that stuffing of one bird into another! – was a gross self-indulgence and certainly not the done thing in Britain.”
“The most corrosive impact of the forces that shaped London’s restaurant sector, particularly at the top end, was a by-the-numbers approach, which insisted that certain things be done not because they might be, say, fun or even merely pleasant, but because it was a ‘fine-dining’ restaurant, and that’s what a joint with that title demanded. With little embedded restaurant tradition to pull upon, there was no real culture of professionalism and precious little skills base in the UK. All the new breed of restaurateur could do was ape what they had seen in France or the US – and all too often they were about as convincing as a six-year-old girl in Mummy’s shoes.”
Paris
In the culinary capital, Rayner embarks on an experiment which is like a scaled-down and posher version of SuperSize Me. He has lunch at a high-end restaurant every day for a week. If he is asked whether he wants to try the tasting/degustation menu, he will have to order it. He goes for a medical examination before and after his experiment to see if it makes any difference to his body.
Restaurants: Restaurant Alain Ducasse, Guy Savoy, Pierre Gagnaire, Le Grand Véfour, L’Astrance, Ledoyen, L’Arpège
“There was no doubt in my mind that a lot of the effect achieved by the Parisian three-star – and by high-end restaurants in general – has little to do with the food itself and everything to do with the supplementaries. Chuck enough gold at the walls, hang enough crystal off the ceiling, employ enough pretty twenty-somethings to care for your every need and follow you to the toilet and, if it’s done with the requisite professionalism, most people will regard it as a good night out before they have eaten a thing. By setting the Paris restaurants up in sequence, I had cut through all that.”
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Rayner writes in the first person, in a style that’s very conversational where he addresses the reader directly. Like every foodie, he’s obsessed with food blogs and we learn of his addiction to blogs and forums like eGullet.com, Chez Pim, Opinionated About etc.
However, he sometimes came across as hypocritical. For example, on the one hand he says he wants the authentic experience so he can give a fair assessment of the restaurant. Then on the other, he goes and makes reservations by either calling on the restaurant’s PR company or pulling some string or two to wrangle a table. More often than not, he ends up getting comped or will have some extra dishes appearing on his table without prompting on his part. Of course, once you do that, you’re never going to get an authentic experience as such. Later into his journey, however, he does realise that there’s some conflict in his quest for authenticity and the free meals (and sometimes posh accommodation) that he’s getting. Thus he decides that he should make it a rule that he pays for his meals. However, ‘cos of his reputation and connections, he still got many free meals and special treatment even when he forked out money from his own pocket. But I applaud his efforts.
“When I was eating on the house, I was always somebody’s bitch. That was something I didn’t like. Somehow, from now on, I would have to pay for every meal myself. Of course, it would be expensive, but if I didn’t do that, I would never find the type of experiences I was hunting for. I would never understand what was happening out there. The journey would be wasted.”
Though it’s a book that’s not necessarily accessible since not many of us can really afford to travel and eat the way he did, it’s a piece of literature that’s delectable enough for the literary foodie especially with Rayner’s acerbic wit and self-deprecating humour.