The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner - Hardcover

Chapter One

LAS VEGAS

The first time I visited Las Vegas it was to interview a man who was famous because his wife had cut off his penis. It says much for the shape of my career back in the mid nineties that I regarded the assignment as light relief. For the previous week I had been in Toronto investigating a particularly grisly set of murders. A young, middle- class couple—all white teeth and glossy hair—had dragged young women to their pastel- colored house down by Lake Ontario, videoed each other sexually assaulting them, then chopped up their bodies and set them in concrete.

The court cases were still ongoing when I visited Canada in February of 1995 to report the story and, because the accused were being tried separately, there was a lockdown on the reporting of the details until both trials were concluded. Nobody in Canada was meant to know anything about what had been dubbed the Ken and Barbie murders and, if they did know anything, they certainly weren’t meant to talk to reporters like me about it. This forced silence only added to my gloom. Everywhere I went the ground was crusted with ice. Snow blew against my cheeks like so much grit on the wind, and in a restaurant in the city’s theater district I acquired food poisoning courtesy of some spareribs, which hadn’t been particularly good on the way down and were much worse on the way up. I couldn’t wait to escape Canada for the sudden sunshine and warmth of Vegas, even if it was to interview a wife beater called John Wayne Bobbitt, who had achieved notoriety only because, one muggy summer’s night, he and his penis had managed to arrive at the hospital in different vehicles.

Bobbitt had gone to Vegas in search of an honest man to manage his career, because he felt he had been deceived by his previous manager. While it might seem odd that anybody should go to Vegas—a place long famous for its store of shysters, con men, and career hoods—in search of honesty, it was no more peculiar than that Bobbitt should have been in need of a manager at all. By then he had parlayed the knife attack on him by his then-wife Lorena into a thriving career. On my first full day in the city, enthroned at the huge black glass pyramid that is the Luxor Hotel at the north end of The Strip, I got to witness that career for myself. Bobbitt had starred in a video called John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut, which was, depending on your taste for euphemism, either an adult movie or a desperate skin flick.

The tag line on the cover said it all: "Ever since this whole thing happened all everybody wants to see is my penis . . . now you can." Indeed I could. It was a living monument to the powers of cutting- edge microsurgery, and looked not unlike a tree that had been doctored by a tree surgeon or as if it were wearing a tiny life belt. It also functioned pretty well, as the video let me see in more detail than could ever be necessary.

This was the image that was burned into my mind when I went off to meet Bobbitt and his new manager for dinner, which may explain why I cannot for the life of me recall a single thing I ate that night. I know we discussed Bobbitt’s plans for a range of branded merchandise including a "penis protector"—an autographed hollow tube—because you don’t forget that sort of thing in a hurry.

I do remember that he came across as spectacularly stupid, and grunted his words rather than spoke them. I also recall that outside, Caesars Forum, the covered shopping arcade where the restaurant was located, dusk fell every half hour courtesy of some clever lighting effects. Of the meal itself I can tell you nothing at all. This is something I regret, for the dinner took place at a seminal restaurant in the history of modern Las Vegas dining: the branch of Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, which opened at Caesars Palace in 1992.

Before Spago opened (and for a good few years afterward), food in the big casino hotels of Vegas was regarded only as an amenity, something the gamblers needed to keep them going while they emptied their pockets at the blackjack tables. It was the city of the all- you- can- eat $4.99 buffet and very little else. It’s true that, in the mid nineties, enterprising hoteliers were beginning to experiment with the notion that there might be sources of income in Vegas other than gaming. Hotels like the Luxor and the Arthurian- themed Excalibur, complete with amusement park rides for the kids, had been put up with the self- declared aim of rebranding the city as a family resort.

In 1992 only the corporations wanted to be there. No self- respecting chef or restaurateur would go near the place, unless they had a sideline as a high roller. Apart from Puck. As America rose out of the recession of the early nineties, he recognized the growing power of the leisure dollar. For many years, though, he had the city to himself. Then, in October 1998, the Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn opened the $1.7 billion, 3,000-room Bellagio Hotel on the former site of the legendary Dunes Hotel and Golf Course, and everything changed. The city had never seen anything like it, which is saying something for a town that has seen most everything.

Inspired by the Lake Como resort of the same name, it was at the time the most expensive hotel ever built, only later to be trumped in cost by other hotels built by Steve Wynn. It came complete with a multimillion- dollar fountain display out front that danced to piped music. There was an art gallery bulging with works by the great Impressionists from Gauguin and Monet to van Gogh and Renoir. It also happened to have eleven new restaurants.

Although Wynn paid the bills it was the then food and beverage manager of the Bellagio, an Egyptian called Gamal Aziz, who came up with the idea. He had worked in grand hotels all over the world and, when he arrived, was shocked to discover just how lousy the food in Vegas could be. He had stumbled across those buffets and realized that this was where ingredients went to die. "I wanted to signal a change," he told me. "To say there was something new and different about Las Vegas.

"Restaurants weren’t just places you went to eat. They were to be signifiers, statements about the city’s newfound confidence and sophistication. It helped that the U.S. had seen a restaurant renaissance during the nineties, and that media interest in food had exploded. The U.S. cable channel, the Food Network, founded in 1993, had come of age by 1998, after being brought under new ownership the year before. The names of top chefs were now familiar to people who were not in regular striking distance of their restaurants.

At the same time journalists like Ruth Reichl, then restaurant critic for the New York Times, were reinvigorating food writing and championing cooks who might otherwise have been ignored. Into the Bellagio, therefore, came a restaurant by the Alsatian uber-chef Jean- Georges Vongerichten and a new outpost of the legendary Le Cirque from New York. Big- name American chefs like Michael Mina, Todd English, and Julian Serrano were offered deals.

And what deals! Generally there would be an annual consultancy fee, plus 5 percent of the gross. All they had to do was fill the tables and, if they wanted to, forget about the bottom line. As long as there was money coming in, they got a cut of it. Plus, if there was a profit, they got 10 percent of that, too, and there was a lot of profit. Suddenly people were no longer coming to town merely to throw their money away in the casinos while surviving on desiccated shrimp or lumps of sweaty pork that had been festering under the heat lamps of the all- you- can- eat buffets for six hours. The tables they were coming to were covered not with green baize, but in heavyweight linen. Every hotel on The Strip had to have a superstar chef in residence or, better still, six of them, or twelve—and it wasn’t just the big U.S. names. The French boys with the Michelin stars were starting to pay attention as well. In 2004 non- gaming revenues in Las Vegas—from high- end hotel rooms, glossy arcades of shops stuffed full of Cartier and Chanel and, of course, those restaurants—overtook gaming revenues for the first time. This wasn’t because gambling had suddenly fallen out of favor. Gaming was still a roaring express train, which was pouring cash into the town. It was just that more money was being spent on all the other stuff. If you were interested in restaurants, you had to be there.

"What happened to him?"

"He left," Freddie says. "After six months." And then, as if I had asked why, "Because I wanted him to leave." So now he was running a restaurant called Piero’s without a Piero. It seats 350 people and is only open for dinner.

His place, he says, has always been a local place. Nobody gets hassled at Piero’s. As it says on his Web site: "It quickly became a hangout for Las Vegas locals and celebrities like the Rat Pack, politicians, and some of those businessmen in the casino industry with Italian surnames, the ‘local color’ guys." All of this plays up to the myths, of course—by 1982 the Rat Pack was probably talking hip replacements and pensions— but it’s clear the restaurant has had an interesting clientele over the years.

Just a few years ago, one of the big casino developers was beaten up at his table over dinner by a bunch of other casino guys, because of an argument over $250,000’ worth of chips, all of which redefines the term "floor show." Later Freddie told the press and the police he didn’t see anything. Or hear anything. At all. He hands me a tightly printed list of the celebrities who have eaten in his dining room downstairs, with its beige leather banquettes and cozy booths and its low ceilings. Some of them mean nothing to me. Who is Too Tall Jones? Just how magical was "Lady of Magic"? But others—Muhammad Ali and George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Sammy Davis, Jr.—are obviously familiar. On the wall behind his desk is a photograph of Sinatra signed, "Hi Freddie, great as usual, Frank."

I ask him what he thinks of the new breed of hotel and restaurant.

"The hotel owners are different today," he says. "In the old days they took care of the customer, and not just the high rollers. Now it’s just too impersonal. Unless you’re a giant player. Then they’ll kiss your ass. As to the restaurants, most of the big names above the door, they aren’t ever there. The chefs just have to be in town maybe a week a month and that’s it." And yet they do well, I say. I want him to moderate his view. After all, I haven’t even started eating yet. I want the place to be good. I don’t want to hear this old guy’s cynicism.

"Sure they do well," he says. "There’s 3,000, 4,000 people staying in the hotels. Where else they gonna go? Wolfgang Puck’s got five or six locations in Vegas now. He’s a good guy. But it’s a little commercial, isn’t it? That’s not about the food. It’s about the name." He goes off on a long rap about the outrageous markups on wine in the city—which I will discover to be the case in some places—and the way some of the fancier restaurants just plate up "three bean sprouts" and call it dinner. "You used to get a hotel room for $10. Now it’s $700. It’s crazy."

I look back at the wall of photographs. "You used to feed the mob guys?"

He shrugs. "They weren’t them. They represented them."

"Do they still eat here?"

He shakes his head, like I’m an idiot. "They’re all dead."

So the old Vegas really has gone: not just dead, but buried, too. Instead I need to discover the new Vegas, which, naturally enough, means going to Paris, though only that bit of Paris located at the Venetian Hotel. I have a table at Bouchon, an affectionate rendition of the classic French brasserie by Thomas Keller, widely regarded as the best American- born chef in the world.

I always knew that Keller would be a part of this journey of mine, and more than once. At The French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in New York, he partners soft- boiled eggs with black truffle purees and makes a mille-feuille of crisp green apples. He puts thyme ice cream together with extra- virgin olive oil and makes sorbet out of hibiscus. Anybody in search of the perfect meal will want a piece of that. Here at Bouchon, however, he (or his team, for Keller is either in California or New York to night) does straight- up French brasserie food, which is something I have always loved. Asked once what type of food I would choose, if I could eat that and only that for the rest of my life, I chose a menu of French brasserie classics: of fruits de mer and steak frites, of cassoulet and pot-au-feu and rabbit in mustard sauce. Nothing else seems to me to speak so loudly or clearly to the appetite. I was excited about eating at Bouchon.

The walls of the restaurant are a studied shade of nicotine in a room where very few people smoke. There is a tiled floor. There is wood paneling and engraved glass and mirrors and, before me, there is a perfect dish of fresh oysters on the half shell with a ramekin of shallot vinegar.

"I’m sorry?"

"Those two." He nods across the aisle. "She’s his date for the evening, if you get what I’m saying."

"You mean . . . ?"

He nods. After all, in Nevada prostitution is legal. "I always stop in Vegas for a few days to get a little R&R when I come on a business trip," he says. And then, "Isn’t Las Vegas a great city?" He doesn’t wink at me, conspiratorially, but I get the message. He could be that guy over there and tomorrow night he probably will be.

My instinct is to dismiss his take on the matter, not least because of his enthusiasm for it. Just because a woman is wearing a low- cut dress doesn’t mean she’s available to anybody by the hour. And yet it makes a kind of sense. I had watched her laugh at his jokes just a little too keenly and then seen her face fall dead as she stared off into a corner of the restaurant, as if distracted by an unrelated thought. I am comforted by the notion that if she is a hooker, the sex, almost inevitably mediocre, will at least have been preceded by good food; that, long after she has showered to remove his smell, she will still be remembering the way those salty little eggs burst against the roof of her mouth to release their rich, oily taste with its ghost of fishiness.

Because, that brûlée aside, the food has been good. Even so, I’m not entirely convinced by the experience. Bouchon looks out over a carefully tended courtyard garden. Adolescent cypress trees spear the sky, and there is a studied elegance and maturity about the view. This room is about as far away from the Vegas of slot machines and blackjack tables as it is possible to be. That—combined with jet lag and four glasses of good Californian wine—has, I think, created in me a sense of dislocation. I don’t entirely know where I am. Or, to put it another way, I could be anywhere, which may be their intention. What I want is a Vegas experience. I want the kind of experience I couldn’t have anywhere else in the world. Happily, I have a reservation for just such a place the following night.

In 1996 Joël Robuchon turned fifty and, as he had always said he would, he retired. That year he was named chef of the century by the (then) highly regarded French guide Gault Millau. He is a small, odd-looking man with a squashed face, as if somebody has inadvertently folded away the middle. He favors black, collarless shirts and has a monkish air, as if a part of his personality has also been folded away. Anybody who meets him will not be surprised to discover that, as a boy, he trained for the priesthood until he was forced to leave the seminary by lack of funds, only to take a job in a hotel kitchen.

Those British chefs I know who have worked for him—Gordon Ramsay, Richard Neat—attrib...