Hungry Page 3
At the center was Mr. White himself: thin, 28 when the book was published, with unruly dark hair, penetrating eyes and veins running down his forearms that made them resemble hydraulic pork shanks.
Before then, well-known chefs and food writers tended to be plump, jolly figures, like Russian nesting dolls: James Beard, Julia Child, A. J. Liebling. The French master Fernand Point wasn’t so jolly, but he had a belly that toddled in front of him like a kettle grill. These men and women were not especially sexy beasts.
Mr. White, on the other hand, looked as if he had been raised in the woods. He resembled Jim Morrison, Sweeney Todd and Lord Byron. He wielded a cleaver the way Bruce Lee wielded nunchucks. He seemed as if he popped supermodels into his mouth like ortolans.
It was not difficult to ascertain why a young man in his formative years—especially one with romance or rage in his heart but not much of a promising future—might aspire to give cooking a go. Meanwhile hours and hours of programming appeared on the Food Network in the 1990s just as the alternative-rock algae bloom began to dissipate: Molto Mario, Two Fat Ladies, Iron Chef. If the pop-chart breakthrough of Nirvana’s Nevermind had been a watershed moment in 1991, its echo at the end of the decade, in 2000, had to be the publication of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. It was a gonzo classic—his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his Down and Out in Paris and London, but with more salmonella-laced eggs Benedict—that made kitchen life feel like a ride on board a scurvied, scurrilous pirate ship, the last leaky vessel on which a merry band of fuckups could ever expect to set sail. One day chefs were fat, crusty old Frenchmen in toques. The next day (which, of course, really amounted to a whiplash succession of years) they were auteurs, scalawags, Picasso punks, the cast of Trainspotting, shortening their lives with pork belly instead of smack. (It sounds fun until it dawns on you that both Anthony Bourdain and Kurt Cobain wound up taking their own lives.)
Don’t make me say it.
Okay, then. The cliché no one could resist. Chefs began to be viewed as “rock stars,” with the attendant celebrity status and reflexive expectation of sloppy behavior. It was a ridiculous and reductive trope except in the sense that chefs did begin to populate and even dominate the cultural conversation in a way that musicians had in the preceding decades. Chefs were now avatars of the counterculture, with a fuck-off, dangling-cigarette flair that had once belonged to the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin.
It was a facile lens through which to see the world, and oddly enough it made little sense when applied to Redzepi. There were only faint traces of “rock star” about him. Tawdry tales of debauched antics did not follow around in his wake. He didn’t swagger; he didn’t leer. During my years of drifting in and out of Redzepi’s orbit, I rarely saw him take a sip of alcohol—and when he did, his enjoyment seemed to peter out fast. I hate to break it to readers who have come to these pages looking for reckless profanity and mischief, but Redzepi was a devoted husband and the father of daughters around whom he had a tendency to melt. He did not speak in feral tones of guitar-smashing, burn-it-all-down iconoclasm. He didn’t seem to fetishize rebellion. He was a worker. He was a builder. A perfectionist. A plodder and a plotter. His enemies were apathy and laziness. Demons of some unique genus drove the man, to be sure, but they did not belong to the class of demons that extract payment in the form of wrecked hotel rooms and dissolute self-sabotage. His, instead, were the demons familiar to viewers of Citizen Kane and The Godfather and The Great Gatsby, the demons that spur certain people to amass instead of making a mess.
Redzepi was no Sid Vicious. If we relied on the class of 1977 as our framework, I suppose we could compare him to David Byrne of Talking Heads, a band that seemed to expand onstage with each song in Stop Making Sense, gradually gathering force into a multicultural multitude of churning, bleeping, whirring, galloping accord.
Copenhagen was the source of that groove and you could feel his presence all over that city if you knew where to look. When food journalists traveled to Copenhagen to write about Redzepi, a meal at Noma usually served as the capper, the closing statement, but there would be a week or so of run-up to the experience, like a scavenger hunt of appetizers leading to the main course. Noma was the spine of a neural network that spanned outward. You had to pay a visit to Amass, whose chef, Noma veteran Matt Orlando, brought a streak of citrus sunshine (Orlando had grown up outside San Diego) to a tasting menu that rolled out with unforced ease. (If you wanted to get up from your table at Amass and stretch your legs, the servers invited you to spend some time around the bonfires that they lit every night in the garden out by the water.) You had to make a visit to Sanchez, whose chef, Noma veteran Rosio Sánchez, was—yes, in Denmark—cooking some of the finest tacos and salsas to be found outside of Mexico. You knew you were expected to pay your respects to Noma veteran Christian Puglisi—his pizza at Bæst, his wine bar called Manfreds, his tasting menu at Relæ. You knew you’d be a fool to skip the delicious fresh seafood at Kødbyens Fiskebar, owned by Noma veteran Anders Selmer, one of Redzepi’s close friends. All of these people—Selmer, Sánchez, Orlando, Puglisi—were made members of the Redzepi mafia. They were family. (For the chefs in Copenhagen who existed outside of Redzepi’s solar system, or on its periphery, this dynamic could be maddening. Because of Noma, influential food writers and editors flew into town on a regular basis, and you could trace their steps on Instagram, but coaxing them into one of the Redzepi-unaffiliated establishments was an exercise in futility: there was NomaLand and there was No-Man’s-Land.)
NomaLand extended outward, too. NomaLand covered the continents. Name nearly any city out loud to Redzepi and there was a good chance he knew where you should eat. Where you needed to eat. Where he knew the chef personally and he wanted you to contact him or her right away. The importance of this was nonnegotiable. There are those who enjoy recommending restaurants and there are those (I count myself among them) who can be pushy about it. Redzepi pushed past pushiness to a prescriptive urgency. He abhorred the concept of a wasted meal. (Now and then, while I traveled through Mexico with him and his posse, we would have no choice but to settle for a mediocre tourist trap—we were hungry and there were no other options on the horizon. Capitulating to this necessity seemed to bring Redzepi to the edge of despair.) Often his recommendations were driven by his alliances, which is to say he had friends, disciples, and deputies on every continent. The list was long: David Chang and Danny Bowien and Wylie Dufresne in New York, José Andrés in Washington, D.C., Enrique Olvera in Mexico City, Kylie Kwong in Sydney, Jessica Koslow in Los Angeles, Daniel Patterson in San Francisco, Blaine Wetzel on Lummi Island in the Pacific Northwest, Massimo Bottura in Italy, Michel Troisgros in France. Among them Redzepi was like a godfather, able to summon his sidekicks at will.
I would meet many more people along the way, after our feast with Enrique Olvera. A journey had just begun. I didn’t know this yet, either. The years would unfold and I would awake to find myself in a series of unexpected situations: making tortillas with Mayan women in a Yucatán village, bobbing in a fishing boat above the arctic circle in Norway, harvesting watercress from a hillside next to Bondi Beach in Sydney, tracing the neural and molecular pathways of flavor with a pastry chef in the Bronx. I may have said no originally, but Redzepi had a gift for bending things toward yes, and after a while I gave up trying to fight it. Pretty soon I realized that everywhere he was going represented a crucial step forward, and there was no point in declining to tag along. Why, after all, did Nick Carraway keep hanging around with Jay Gatsby? I instinctively knew that I needed to shake up my life. Redzepi knew this, too—about himself and maybe even about me.
In May 2014, when we first went to Mexico, Redzepi and his wife, Nadine Levy Redzepi, had two daughters, Arwen and Genta. A third, to be named Ro, was due in a few weeks. René and Nadine had just moved into a new home. “We bought a ruin, more or less,” Redzepi told me. “It hasn
’t been renovated for thirty-eight years. It’s a house right next to Noma—an actual house. It takes me seven minutes to walk to work.” He had endured a hellish year in 2013. After the rush of being named the best restaurant in the world for three years in a row, Noma had dropped out of the top spot after dozens of customers at Noma had fallen ill with norovirus, a bug that sends victims into spasms of diarrhea and vomiting in which one’s guts seem to be simultaneously melting and burning up. Even if accidental—the virus was later traced to a bad batch of mussels—it had been a humiliating turn. “World’s top chef eats a little crow over Noma’s norovirus outbreak,” as one headline put it. If now was the time for the comeback, it would take a lot of work.
* * *
—
Tom Petty was right. Waiting is the hardest part.
Physically and spiritually, we’re in the Oaxaca airport—Redzepi and Bowien and Donnola and myself, waiting around after a flight from Mexico City. It feels like limbo. Somebody was supposed to have picked us up, but there aren’t any cars in sight. The arrivals area has the tumbleweed drift of a ghost town. The morning sun makes us wince. Redzepi points out that the day began back in Mexico City when he dropped his toothbrush into a toilet.
“Feel the difference in the air here?” Redzepi says. I notice that his rate of contentment upticks considerably each time we travel farther away from a city, but he’s still in the anxiety zone. He’s giving off a faint Jesus Christ Superstar vibe in flip-flops and a loose blue shirt. He lights a cigarette. He isn’t supposed to be smoking, but he does so now and then to relieve stress. Just the occasional smoke. He’d rather not, but…
Bowien stands, staring at the far-off hills in a daze. “Man, it’s beautiful here,” he says.
We wait outside the airport for a while. Time seems to have stopped. We could hail a taxi except that we don’t see any taxis and we aren’t sure where we’re supposed to go. A local chef named Alejandro Ruíz has been notified that we are en route, but nobody knows how to reach him. Traveling in Mexico had taught Redzepi to be more forgiving in his approach to punctuality than he normally would be back in Scandinavia. “A lot of these guys—they don’t write anything down,” he observes. “None of them seem to worry much.”
We wait.
“Now my Danish organization is clicking in and I’ve got to calm down,” Redzepi says, sucking harder on the cigarette.
We wait.
“Let me call Enrique because there’s no one here to pick us up,” he says.
While Redzepi puts a cell phone to his ear and starts trying to get a decent connection, Bowien and I fall into conversation. He, too, has found himself in a funk. After roaring out of the gate with Mission Chinese Food in New York and winning a James Beard Award as the Rising Star Chef, Bowien watched it all collapse into a heap of wreckage when his Lower East Side restaurant was found to be infested with mice and was shut down by the city’s health department. When he heard the news, just a few months ago in the fall of 2013, Bowien was holed up in a hotel room in San Francisco, paralyzed by dread and embarrassment, staring up at the ceiling. When he did answer the phone, he heard a Danish accent on the other end of the line: They’re coming for you, Redzepi told him. They smell blood. You’re hurt, you’re wounded, and they’re going to come for you.
Months later, Bowien is here in white sneakers and black shorts in the drifting silence of the Oaxaca airport, another member of the Redzepi caravan who’s shell-shocked and trying to figure things out. “All of a sudden you’re in Oaxaca with the best chef in the world,” he muses to me. “How does this happen?”
Bowien has stopped drinking alcohol and coffee. He’s considering cutting out meat. Caught briefly in the Manhattan Corryvreckan of fame, his ego feasting on positive reinforcement, he found himself partying without end. He drank too much, ate too much. In his early thirties, he’s already world-weary. “Being a chef, just the act of eating itself gets to be a job and it’s tiring,” he says. “And it’s the worst thing in the world to complain about.” On the phone in that hotel room in San Francisco, Redzepi told him, Don’t worry, don’t listen to the bullshit. You’re great, you’re gonna get past this.
“It’s a testament to what a good person he is that he took the time to do that,” Bowien says.
We wait some more. Redzepi hasn’t found a ride. Bowien stands in the sunshine in his shorts, sniffing the Oaxacan air. He says, “I still basically don’t know what I’m doing.”
Finally a call comes through. “That was the chef,” Redzepi says. “He thought the pickup was at nine thirty. Welcome to Mexico.” Either we’re an hour early or someone’s an hour late. We’ll learn to adjust to these rhythms.
* * *
—
“Are you ready for this, guys?” Redzepi asks. Into the market we go.
Shawls of glistening tripe, blood sausage glowing with ruby-black fat, tenderloins draped on a counter like a landing strip for flies, bags full of chicken hearts, the smiles of slaughtered pigs, dripping viscera left out in the open air…wild cherries, prickly pears, fruits with spikes, avocados whose skin you can eat, avocado leaves that smell like licorice…slices of coconut meat dusted with chili powder and kissed by lime, tomatoes so red they remind Redzepi of the tomatoes back in Macedonia when his father would take him back to the home country…a fruit called granada de moco that’s split open and looks like mucus studded with crunchy seeds…the smell of tropical fruits and the smell of tortillas and the smell of piss and the smell of shit…plastic water pistols and pink stuffed toys and blessed Virgin Marys and bleeding Christs on crosses…herbs drying in the sun, herbs carried on heads, herbs being rubbed against a woman’s leg while a preacher or a shaman murmurs a blessing—“Check it out, there’s a healing ceremony going on,” Redzepi says—innards sizzling in lard…galaxies of chiles, oceans of nuts, pyramids of palm sugar, lakes of tamarind paste…babies suckling on bare breasts, young women whose aprons overflow with fried and spiced grasshoppers…miniature green plums that look like olives, chickens spinning in front of gusts of fire while a sweet fragrance rises from burning wood chips…“You’ve seen a lot of rotisseries in your life, but this one,” Redzepi says, “is the most impressive rotisserie I’ve ever seen.”
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson once said. And when a man fails to be energized and levitated by the carnival of a Mexican marketplace, he must be dead inside. To watch René Redzepi in a Mexican marketplace—in any marketplace anywhere, really, but especially in Oaxaca—is like getting a contact high from somebody else’s peyote trip. Led along by Oaxaca restaurateur Alejandro Ruíz and accompanied by Danny Bowien, Redzepi murmurs and exclaims like a man in the grips of a hallucination. He darts like Bugs Bunny on a carrot bender, grazing on tacos and plums and tamarinds and fatty corozo nuts, spitting out seeds and shells as he moves. He picks up a green bouquet of leaves and gasps. “Look at the quality of this epazote,” he says.
“If you have a quesadilla without this, it’s like having sex with a condom,” Ruíz says.
We meet two women standing next to a vat of liquid. “You have to try this,” Ruíz says. The drink is tejate, a pre-Columbian elixir that is made with corn, fermented cacao, the pit of the mamey fruit, and a tree-borne flower known as rosita de cacao. Its color and consistency calls to mind a chocolate egg cream in an old New York deli. Beige froth levitates on top of the liquid like the meringue in île flottante, the French dessert. We ask for a few cups of it and chug it down. It tastes like primeval chocolate milk. “Wow, it’s amazing,” Bowien says. “The stuff on the top is like cream.”
Redzepi’s pinging around like a kid playing a video game in which new surprises keep getting projectiled in his direction.
“You smell this and you’re, like, ‘Come on,’ ” he says, grabbing a bouquet of green and burying his nose in it.
“They use the basil to clean your soul,” Ruíz explains. “That’s what they believe.”
“Look at the tiny mangos,” Redzepi goes on, delirious.
“Have you ever tried this plum?” Ruíz asks.
Redzepi spies a bubbling pan. In the middle of the hot pan is a mound of meat frying away its fat. Around the rim is a trough, a sort of moat in which bubbles a spicy black-red broth. At the taquero’s elbow rises a stack of tortillas. “How many tacos can we eat?” Here is the Mexico that the global gabachos can’t pretend to understand. Authenticity? “Nobody knows what that is,” Redzepi says. “People—it’s like they’ve been to three taquerias in Los Angeles and suddenly they’re specialists. I think I’m going to buy a piñata….”
“How are you gonna pack that?” Bowien says.
* * *
—
We take a table in an outdoor patio at Casa Oaxaca Café, one of several restaurants that Ruíz owns around town. “This is the land of corn, so you will see different ways of using corn,” Ruíz says with a modesty that qualifies as an inside joke, considering the deliciousness we are about to confront. Ruíz tells us a little about himself. He grew up on a subsistence farm with chickens and pigs running around. He milked cows. He chased hens that would be killed for his mother’s broth. The farm didn’t make money, but the family ate well. “I was born in a village of one hundred families,” he says. “I told myself if I ever go to the States, I will never go there to find a job. I will go there on vacation.” His father almost died once in an attempt to cross the border into Texas. “Land of opportunity”—Ruíz seems gently rankled that such a phrase would be applied exclusively to Mexico’s bloated neighbor to the north. “Here it is also possible,” he says. “You have to believe in it. And you have to work for it.” By now he is stout and gentrified, a barrel-chested empire builder with barely concealed appetites. But just like Redzepi, he started cooking in professional kitchens when he was fifteen.