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  Later on, after Redzepi had founded Noma, a chef named Roberto Solís came to work in the kitchen. The two men became friends, and their friendship continued even after Solís moved back to Mérida to open a restaurant called Nectar. Working night and day to make Noma into a restaurant of international significance may have been rewarding on the surface, but it began turning Redzepi into an angry husk of a human being, charred and brittle, and one day Solís offered a temporary cure: an invitation to come visit him in Mexico, eat some tacos, hang out. Redzepi, as is his style, said yes, but the trip was taxing enough to make him doubt his judgment. He caught flights from Copenhagen to Amsterdam to New York to Houston to Mérida. “It was one of those stupid trips,” he said. “I was just so tired and bummed out.” By the time he reached this Mayan stronghold on the Yucatán Peninsula, Redzepi was ready to pass out. But he had to eat something first.

  Solís took his friend to a place called Los Taquitos de PM. The unlikeliness of this was hilarious. Los Taquitos de PM was not some delightful hideaway tucked into a cobblestoned alleyway where an abuelita stirred pozole in a cast-iron pot. Los Taquitos de PM was tacky as hell—garish—with plastic chairs and corporate cola signs and the sort of lighting that induces migraines and instant hangovers. Redzepi was about to alter the course of his life, but at the moment when he spied Los Taquitos de PM along the side of a bleakly unromantic thoroughfare, he thought he had made a mistake in hauling his ass to this part of the world.

  His resistance intensified when he caught his first glimpse of the food. Solís ordered three plates of tacos al pastor. In the dish, shavings of pork, stained red after being bathed in a chili sauce with achiote and other spices, are sawed off a trompo—a spinning vertical skewer—and layered on corn tortillas with threads of pineapple on top. Lebanese immigrants helped to give birth to the dish when they brought shawarma to Mexico, which means that tacos al pastor qualify as a unique example of Mayan-Caribbean–Middle Eastern fusion. But all you need to know is that when most lovers of Mexican food spy a trompo in the marketplace, these tacos are what they crave.

  Redzepi didn’t. Pineapple? he thought. “I was so skeptical when I saw that,” he said. “Like a bad pizzeria.” Hunger can lead to breakthroughs, though. Redzepi pinched a taco between his fingers and took a bite. “That first mouthful. Soft. Tasty. Acidic. Spicy. It’s like when you have sushi and it’s great for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. And my virginity was taken. In the best possible way. That was the moment.”

  By the time I crossed paths with him in Mexico City, his fleeting taco bliss had morphed into an obsession. Redzepi had been back to Mexico more times than he could count. He returned again and again with his family to recharge his engines and flee the pewter-skyed, bone-chilling Danish winters. “I was burned out,” he’d written in his journal.

  Success is a marvelous thing, but it can also be dangerous and limiting. Suddenly we’d become a fine-dining establishment and had begun listening to questions about whether we needed real silverware, or if the waiters should wear suits. Like the food would improve with a bow tie. Those things had never been important to us; we’d always put all our efforts into people and creativity, not commodities. One month in Mexico and I’d realized the truth—I was scared, scared of losing the precious worldwide attention we’d stumbled into. All of us were. We were too worried about what people expected of the so-called “world’s best restaurant,” rather than focusing on what we expected of ourselves. We had stopped following our natural instincts and trusting that our memories are valuable enough to shape our daily lives at the restaurant. I won’t let questions like that distract us anymore.

  Mexico was where he could see clearly, and the complexity of Mexican cuisine—the corn, the chiles, the fruits, the edible insects, the sharp differences from region to region—haunted him like a love affair whose memory he couldn’t shake. He needed to come back to these flavors.

  And here at Pujol, where chef Enrique Olvera raised Mexican cuisine to a new form of edible narrative, Redzepi watched and tasted everything in a fugue state of anticipation and reaction. Of all the dishes and ingredients that captivated him, nothing in Mexico cast more of a spell than mole. What is mole? Well, maybe it’s more useful to ask what mole isn’t and even then you’ll wind up stumped. The ingredients that merge within it represent all of the cultures that have clashed to form what Mexico is: the indigenous people who occupied the land first, the European invaders who forced their way in, the immigrants from the Middle East and Africa and Asia. Often lazily viewed by gabachos as simply a sauce, or a sauce made with chocolate—mole poblano, which is but one of countless strains—“mole” is ultimately a word used to link a fellowship of sauces. There are so many varieties with so many ingredients in so many household interpretations across Mexico that it’s fruitless to think about tracking them all. Studying mole is like studying the subatomic realm: The quest goes on and on.

  This multiplicity is exactly what drew Redzepi in. The cuisine of Denmark had nothing resembling mole. He wanted to figure out how it worked. Doing so was impossible, which was why he wanted to try. Redzepi was like Glenn Gould going granular with Bach’s counterpoint and wondering how he could unravel its coils of DNA by slowing it down, or pulling it apart, or flattening it, or turning it sideways. In the following three years Redzepi would return to mole with the determination of a mathematician, the diligence of a yogi.

  It turned out he had brought me here to Pujol because he was friends with Enrique Olvera, but also because if a person had a passion for mole, this was the place to be. Olvera’s mole stood as the pièce de résistance. It was the mole that ruled them all. It was an epic poem about history and time. The mole at Pujol reverberated with layers of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, star anise, almonds, pecans, peanuts, onion, thyme, oregano, marjoram, dried chilhuacle rojo chiles, dried chilhuacle amarillo chiles, plantains with the skin on, and heirloom tomatoes, but even that litany of components didn’t capture what it tasted like, because mole was the game that moved as you played, the answer that was always in flux, sauce as quantum physics. As Olvera would explain it, “The recipe adapts to seasonality and the ingredients change accordingly. It might have hazelnut or almond or macadamia or a mix of all three. The same is true for the tomatoes, the fruits, even the chiles. All of the ingredients, regardless of the season, are toasted in a comal, a heavy cast-iron griddle, in order to avoid the heaviness that often accompanies a mole with fried ingredients. They are then ground in a stone mill: first the fruits, then the spices, the nuts, and the chiles. The new paste is then cooked and the old mother mole is fed with it. What’s truly remarkable is that it changes every day it is reheated. It can be fruit-forward and bitter or spicier and nuttier. Since the mole is an ever-changing universe in itself, we present it without animal protein and instead just with a fresh tortilla and some sesame seeds.”

  In other words, this was a mole so profound and delicious that Olvera and his kitchen crew did not even serve it on top of or underneath a piece of meat. They served it by itself: sauce on a plate. Imagine a French chef bringing you a plate of Dover sole meunière without the fish—simply the buttery liquid itself and a basket of bread. But beyond the surrealism of that gesture, Olvera’s boundary pushing with the tradition of mole took on an extra ingredient that could be tricky and fickle: time. Instead of making a new batch of mole madre every few days, the cooks at Pujol kept adding more to the original pot. The first iteration of the mole joined the second version of the mole and then they both joined the third interpretation of the mole and on and on and on, for weeks on end, with new ingredients making their acquaintance with old ingredients and all of the old ingredients aging and deepening and acquiescing with the passing of time. The mole changed, the seasons changed, we changed, you changed—is this a restaurant dish or a passage from the Bhagavad Gita? “When I tried it the first time, I had goose bumps,” Redzepi told me. By now, Olvera himself—be
arded and grinning, possessed of a Lebowski-like calm as he ambled around the dining room—had sidled up to our table. “Enrique,” Redzepi asked him, “how old is the mole?”

  “Three hundred and seventy days,” Olvera said.

  “See what happens,” Redzepi said.

  At each place setting there was a plate and on each plate was a circular spill of mahogany sauce. Within that round splash was a smaller circle of rust-colored sauce. It looked like a work of abstract art—a study in earthen hues. “It’s the eye of Sauron,” Redzepi said. “There isn’t a Danish designer from the fifties who wouldn’t have an orgasm looking at this.” You didn’t want to wreck such a stunning visual, but you could not resist. Devouring it couldn’t have been simpler: You grabbed the tortillas and slowly (or quickly, if you were famished) swiped the aged compound of flavors away. We ate silently, as if taking communion. “Don’t be ashamed to ask for more tortillas,” Redzepi said. “Everybody does it.”

  His mind reeled. “Guys,” he said. “Let’s think of what’s happening here. You’re taking a pancake. And you’re dipping it into a sauce. If you went to Per Se and you dipped a pancake into a sauce? There’s something going on here….”

  * * *

  —

  By the time I joined Redzepi in Mexico, I was deep into my walking trance. There are wooded areas of Westchester County, New York, that I now know so well, after years spent traversing them on foot, that I can summon each downed tree trunk in the Google Maps of my mind. What I did as my marriage unraveled felt “healthy” only in the sense that it involved exercise. I would walk for three or four hours at a time. What was unhealthy was the way that my constitutionals formed ruts in my brain, both symbolic and actual. On these walks back and forth along the Hudson River and through the grounds of old Gilded Age estates and up hills into suburban neighborhoods where all manner of Updikean mischief had gone down, I worked over my mistakes and longings with the monotony of a penitent monk. I gnawed on my guilt like jerky. I replayed scenes of heartbreak like an airplane movie stuck on a loop. I replayed the look on my wife’s face when I’d told her, one night, that we would no longer sleep in the same bed. I replayed the feeling of the tears of my children seeping through my jeans as they rested their heads on my lap and I told them that Dad was moving out of the house for a while. I walked north and then south, or south and then north, pretending that I was vaporizing my fuckups—burning them off step by step—when in fact I was only digging them in deeper.

  My strolls were getting me nowhere. If anything, they qualified as a form of sleepwalking—like a marathon that takes place on a Möbius strip. I have a tendency toward obsessive behavior. That has paid dividends in my career as a journalist—hungrily trying to learn everything about music or food or poetry can turn even an autodidact into an expert—but it can stymie my ability to move forward in life. I linger, I stall. Redzepi, in contrast, was all about moving forward. When it came to escaping from ruts, the guy was Houdini. While I would nearly carve a furrow into the ground by walking the same stretch of trail for months at a time, Redzepi’s neural pathways appeared to have an insatiable appetite for fresh data. For new people, too. His international network of contacts was always expanding.

  You could tell when you had been chosen. Your phone would ping. The sound was like the peal of a bell. “Hey buddy,” the text would say. There was something being asked of you and there was something being given. Being asked was the gift—being summoned to join the cause. Being asked meant that Redzepi had recognized some talent in you, and he sensed, maybe, that this light of yours could help illuminate the pathway forward. The club was a band of believers, sisters and brothers united in excellence—not merry pranksters, not a ragtag assemblage of misfits or whatever the going chef stereotype used to be, but a fierce, focused crew, akin to the NASA ground-control team in Apollo 13. If Redzepi was texting you, it meant that he thought your input was valuable. If he was texting you, it meant that you were valuable, or at least it felt that way.

  I began to view his method as a form of Tom Sawyer–ing. Redzepi was a tech-savvy version of the namesake character in Mark Twain’s novel, somehow persuading passersby to join him in the painting of a white picket fence, pro bono, because to paint a white picket fence was to pursue a noble cause. You were beautifying the community, which meant that you were contributing your portion of spirit to the betterment of our world. In this respect Redzepi could be both manipulative and inspiring. Anyway, it was better than going on another walk.

  * * *

  —

  “Hey buddy,” the text said.

  So central was Redzepi’s presence in the middle of the dining room at Pujol—he occupied that cultural space in which his utterances mattered, where people were perched in anticipation of his next word—that it took me a while to realize that Mario Batali and Ken Friedman were occupying a table at the back of the restaurant. Even though they worked in the same business, Redzepi seemed detached from them, cordial but aloof. A few years later, in the midst of the cleansing fires of the #MeToo movement in 2017, Batali (the Babbo chef and Eataly entrepreneur and orange-clogged TV ubiquity) and Friedman (the James Beard Award–winning restaurateur behind April Bloomfield spots like the Spotted Pig in New York and Tosca in San Francisco) would find their careers and reputations obliterated by accusations of sexual misconduct and all-around piggishness. But at this moment in the spring of 2014, in Mexico City, they were still viewed as industry leaders, and as I learned a few minutes later when I endeavored to have a conversation with them, they were so bleary drunk that words tumbled out of their mouths like buffaloes going over a cliff.

  Here at Pujol, though, Batali and Friedman occupied the margins. Redzepi was the star of the show. Around him, like the members of Muhammad Ali’s entourage in Kinshasa, hovered those for whom the ping of a text meant that they qualified as members of Redzepi’s inner circle.

  A NOTE ON OUR COLLECTIVE FOOD OBSESSION

  Walk down the street of any city or village in the world and you will be reminded of the allure of restaurants. Listen to the conversations spilling out onto the sidewalk from bistros and bars with their windows open on a summer night. Look at the people contorting themselves in the doorways of pizzerias, staring in wonder and indecision at the illuminated menus of Chinese take-out depots. Restaurants give cities their hum. Restaurants are the ventricles through which the lifeblood of a metropolis pulses in and out.

  Restaurants played this role for centuries, but they began to give off a specific sort of cultural radiance in the United States with each passing decade of the second half of the twentieth century. Lutèce and the Four Seasons, Chez Panisse and Michael’s, Spago and Stars, Canlis and Chanterelle, the Mandarin and Mr. Chow, Babbo and Bouley, Citrus and Prune, Jaleo and Topolobampo, Le Bernardin and Coi, Nobu and Benu, Momofuku Noodle Bar and Torrisi Italian Specialties, JuneBaby and The Grey, Manresa and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Alinea and Atelier Crenn, Eleven Madison Park and Estela. The menus of these restaurants probably summon up associations for you even if you never stepped through their front doors. They signify an extravagance of energy—creative people converging in a place to create something timeless even though it’s intrinsically impermanent. When it comes to the ones that have closed (Lutèce in New York, Stars in San Francisco, El Bulli in Spain), you wish you could have been there. If you did happen to eat there, you wish you could go back. You can still go to many of them, and you do so with a camera phone at your fingertips, prepared to capture the vaporous sensation of having been present.

  In the early years of the twenty-first century, that wave started to crest. Restaurants and the chefs who dreamed them up moved from a pleasantly diversionary position in American culture to one of urgent centrality. Suddenly chefs became far more interesting (more authentic, less manicured, more voluble, less manipulative—or so we thought) than movie stars or musicians. The rise of food television, and the w
ay it cast a spell over a whole generation of kids, meant that there was a new wing in the pantheon of stardom. Curiously, many of the most celebrated chefs of the 2000s were born in 1977. René Redzepi, David Chang, Jeremy Charles of Raymonds in Newfoundland, Corey Lee of Benu in San Francisco—in fact, Lee and Redzepi have the same birthday. Was there something swimming around in the global water supply in the year that gave us Star Wars and the first Talking Heads album? Or did it come down to what was in the air—and on the air—in the 1990s, just as all of them lurched into adolescence and adulthood?

  White Heat came out in 1990, as the decade dawned. The man behind the book was Marco Pierre White, “the tantrum-throwing enfant terrible of the London food world,” as Dwight Garner would describe him, years later, in The New York Times. “It is relatively little known in the United States, among civilians at any rate,” Garner went on. “But prominent chefs in the waves that followed, including Mario Batali and David Chang, considered it to be perhaps the most important cookbook of the modern food era. White Heat changed the rules of the game. It altered how chefs saw themselves.” A bit more on that from Garner: