Medium Raw

Le Bernardin in New York offers a “Chef ’s Tasting Menu” and I always feel fine after. Both meals are pretty carefully calibrated experiences. Laurent Gras’s L2O in Chicago, Andoni Aduriz’s Mugaritz in Saint Sebastian both take a modest and reasoned approach to the limits of the human appetite.

I mentioned chefs dreading tasting menus.

Consider the curse of Ferran Adrià. Not Ferran Adrià the chef, restaurateur, and creative artist. Ferran Adrià the diner—the “eater,” as he puts it. Ferran Adrià the frequent flyer. Doomed to walk this earth subjected to every jumped-up tasting menu, every wrongheaded venture in “molecular gastronomy” (a term he no longer uses), the interminable, well-intended ministrations of every admirer in every city and every country he may go. Imagine being Ferran Adrià. Food and wine festivals, chefs’ conferences, book tours, symposia. Everywhere he goes, there’s no getting out of it: he either gets dragged proudly to what his local handlers see as his kindred spirit—or he’s just obliged, when in Melbourne or Milwaukee or wherever, to pay homage to the local Big Dog, who’s famously worshipful of him. There’s no slipping in and out of town quietly without dissing somebody. He’s got to go.

One twenty-, thirty-course tasting menu after another, one earnest but half-baked imitator after another, wheeling out the tongue-scorching liquid nitrogen, the painfully imitative, long-discarded-by-Adrià foams, the clueless aping of Catalonian traditions they’ve probably never experienced firsthand.

And all the guy wants is a fucking burger.

Ferran Adrià walks into a bar…it’s like a joke, right? Only, I’m guessing, it’s no longer a joke to him. Because Ferran Adrià can’t walk into a bar—without six or seven freebie courses he never wanted showing up in front of him. When all he wanted was a burger.

Thomas Keller surely knows this pain. If the stories are true, when Keller goes out to dinner, an assistant calls ahead and explicitly orders the restaurant to not, under any circumstances, send any extra courses. There will be no unasked-for amuse-bouches. The chef does not want to see your interpretation of his signature “oysters and pearls.” He’s coming in for your chicken on a stick—which is quite good or he wouldn’t be coming—so please, leave the man alone.

You’re thinking, oh, the poor dears, great chefs all over the world wanting to stuff expensive ingredients in their faces…fuck them! But c’mon…Imagine, day after day, tired from long flights, one hotel bed after another, bleary-eyed, exhausted, craving nothing more complicated than Mom’s meatloaf, a simple roasted chicken—and here it comes, another three-hour extravaganza, usually a less good version of what you do for a living every day. It’s like being an overworked porn star and everywhere you go in your off-hours people are grabbing your dick and demanding a quickie.

Sitting here, wrestling with my reaction to last night’s meal at Per Se, I look back again; I search my memory for details from that greatest meal of my life at the French Laundry. There were me, Eric Ripert, Scott Bryan, and Michael Ruhlman. Twenty-two-some-odd courses—most of them different for each of us. God knows how many wines. A perfect, giddily excited five hours in wine country, thoughtfully punctuated by piss breaks. No one could have asked for more of a meal. Every plate seemed fresh and new—not just the ingredients, but the concepts behind them as well. It was a magical evening filled with many magical little moments. Those memories come back first:

The silly expressions on all our faces at the arrival of the famous cones of salmon tartare—how the presentation “worked” exactly as it was supposed to. Even on the chefs and on Ruhlman, Keller’s coauthor on the cookbook.

The surprise course of “Marlboro-infused coffee custard with pan-seared foie gras,” a dish designed specifically for me—at the time still a three-pack-a-day smoker—an acknowledgment that I was probably tweaking for a butt around that time.

The “oysters and pearls” dish—how thrilled I was to finally taste what I’d only gaped at previously in the lush pages of The Book. How they did not disappoint—if anything, only exceeded expectations. The way the waiter’s hands trembled and shook as he shaved a gigantic black truffle over our pasta courses. How he dropped it—and how, with a look, we all agreed not to tell.

The four of us, during another break before dessert, drunk and whispering like kids on Halloween in the Laundry’s rear garden as we snuck up to the kitchen window and spied enviously on Keller and his crew.