Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

get away with overeating so easily. I tossed and turned, and my nightmare brought a prophecy that proved all too true: I dreamed I was gaining weight.

“So,” said Ducasse, “which do you prefer, the sea bass from Chile or the black bass from America?”

Little did I know when I signed up for this trip that a pop quiz would be involved. Ducasse, who flies back and forth between his two restaurants each week, amassing Michelin stars and frequent flyer miles, invited me to eat with him in the tiny chef ’s room off the kitchen.

It contains a table that seats four as well as six grainy TV monitors for watching the cooks at work.

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This Saturday lunch was my fifth meal at Le Louis XV, and it was an opportunity to complain to Ducasse about portion sizes. I felt that Cerutti was airlifting in supplies so my meals would be large enough.

When I spoke of this too openly to Ducasse, Cerutti took me aside and informed me that he would get even if I kept up the complaints to his boss, so I said no more. Our main course was a piece of lightly salted cod, the salt adding flavor and substance to what is essentially a bland fish with a slithery texture. I complained mildly about the mille-feuille that we were served for dessert, whether the layers of pastry were perhaps too dense and too buttery, and whether the pastry cream should be so preemptively rich, so overwhelming that it drove out all thoughts of petits fours. Ducasse tasted his, declared it “the epitome of vanilla and carmelization,” and informed me of his dessert philosophy: “You shouldn’t eat dessert. Dessert is a sin. So if you are going to sin, do it freely. Having one dessert is like having one mistress, ridiculous. You must have two or three, once you get started.”

He does not cook while in residence at Le Louis XV, nor does the public require that he do so. Whereas famous chefs in American restaurants must occasionally pretend they adore standing in front of a stove in order to satisfy the demands of critics and customers, French chefs at Ducasse’s level of eminence are permitted to be businessmen. He runs an organization that includes the two three-star restaurants, a well-regarded inn in Provence, and a national hotel association. He enjoys challenging those around him, and in my case he was checking out my level of discernment when he asked whether I preferred the Chilean or the American bass.

“The black bass from America,” I said, which was the wrong answer.

His eyes shifted almost imperceptibly as I went from promising gourmet to irreparable jingoist in his estimation.

One morning, Cerutti met me at the outdoor market of Nice. Both Monte Carlo and Nice remain celebrated Riviera destinations, but they have grown apart over the years. Monte Carlo has become a 7 6

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whitewashed tax shelter of gleaming hillside condominiums populated by wealthy Europeans who earn too much to want to part with any of it. Nice continues to exude Gallic conventionality.

For a while, we walked from stall to stall. He kissed all the pretty girls, insisting that he was merely saying good morning in the French manner. He wore jeans, a sweater, and a backpack, and he was very much the celebrity—not, he explained, because of Le Louis XV but because years earlier he had operated his own restaurant only a few blocks away. It was midwinter and so freezing cold that whenever possible I sneaked off and stood in front of an outdoor rotisserie, trying to steal some of the heat from the chickens on the spit.

Cerutti showed me vegetables grown locally in the winter months: tiny broccoli called brocoletti romano being sold by a farmer wearing layers of unwashed clothes; herbs from a pretty girl (kissed); tiny winter apples from a middle-aged woman in a cardigan (not kissed). It is contrary to my urban nature to believe anything can grow in this kind of cold except lichen. Where I see tundra, Cerutti sees farmland. He said the Mediterranean cuisine is at its least interesting during the summer months, “when there are the worst products, the red pepper and tomato and zucchini,” but now there were the small artichokes with the sharp pointed leaves and soon would come morels and green peas and the best baby broad beans in the world.

I saw beautiful goat cheeses, and I asked him why there were none on the cart at Le Louis XV. He explained that at this time of year the milk from the goats was needed to feed the babies, and the farmers who made goat cheese killed the babies to have more of the milk. This was the most compassionate statement about food I had ever heard from a Frenchman, and when I expressed my admiration, he said the business about saving the baby goats was all very nice but the real reason he didn’t serve the cheeses was that the goats were kept indoors this time of year. Thus they could not roam the mountains, eating the wild herbs that gave their milk a special taste.

By now I was shaking. I had dressed in a T-shirt and a light jacket, thinking I would be warm enough, a misconception I blame on Ameri-F O R K I T O V E R

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can restaurants that serve the same warm-weather Mediterranean food throughout the year. I had packed for this trip convinced it was always tomato-growing season along the Mediterranean. Cerutti took me to a small café so deteriorated I would have thought it abandoned had there not been so many people in it. He bought me a huge bowl of café au lait and told me a little of his life.

He grew up on a farm a few miles inland