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

truffles—the oddly delicious rice reminded me a little of Italian risotto and a little of marshmallow fluff.

The sushi was magnificent, even though I had no real interest in eating some of it, such as the dangerous-looking red clam. (Although terribly chewy, it was otherwise harmless.) We had squid, Japanese mack-erel, abalone, needlefish, and herring. The tuna and the toro here were the best I’d ever eaten. Chef Masa Takayama’s raw toro was even better than Matsuhisa’s, and his rich, fatty, melting, knee-weakening barbecued toro was superior to grilled Kobe beef.

Yes, we also ate fugu, the fish of death, which, if not prepared properly, can kill you. It came sprinkled with gold. The first fugu course consisted of raw fugu parts in ponzu. The second was a bite or two of fried fugu and reminded me of crab. That first course included baby chives wrapped in fugu intestines—very nice—as well as the liver of the fish, which I’d always thought was the deadly part. The chef came out to explain why we should eat it. I’m not sure I got this right, but I believe it had something to do with the fish being young and healthy and having eaten a balanced diet and the liver not having turned dark and evil and bloated and virulent.

Anyway, I ate the liver and survived. You think for $425 a person I wasn’t going to clean my plate?

GQ, march 2001

“ A S L O N G A S T H E R E ’ S A M O I S H E ’ S , T H E R E ’ L L A L W A Y S B E A M O N T R E A L ”

“Françoise!” I exclaimed. “You have not changed a bit.”

“William,” she replied, averting her eyes and concentrating on Le Paris’s brandade de morue. She coughed delicately, pretending to choke on a morsel of the sublimely creamy puree of salt cod and not on her obligatory lie: “Neither have you.”

Twenty years had passed since we had last seen each other, twenty years since we were secret agents in the culinary world, restaurant critics writing under an alias for the Montreal Star. Together we had posed as a married couple named William and Françoise Neill, a well-bred, literate, and somewhat quarrelsome team of reviewers.

In reality she was (and still is) Bee MacGuire, a writer with impeccable epicurean credentials. I was (but in 1977 ceased being) the sports columnist for the Star, then the dominant English-language daily in Montreal. The reputation of the newspaper would hardly have suffered had Françoise Neill been unveiled as Bee MacGuire, but public disclosure that a sportswriter—a sportswriter!—had described the sole à l’Armoricaine at the beloved Castillion Restaurant of the Hotel Bona-venture as “a colorless dish . . . both for eye and palate” would have caused an outrage.

Admittedly, I was always looked upon as an odd sort of sportswriter, the kind of fellow who paid a little too much attention to the tea sandwiches served in the Forum press lounge between periods of Canadiens 1 3 6

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games and not enough attention to Guy Lafleur’s shots-on-goal statistics.

Still, nobody ever guessed that I was William Neill.

None of it lasted. Not our professional arrangement. Not Montreal’s stellar dining reputation. Not even the Star, which went out of business in 1979. By then I had left to take a job in Boston, but I returned regularly to Montreal, faithful to a city that was so foreign and yet so comfortable and so close. And when the great restaurants started closing, as they did, I mourned.

Worst for me was the disappearance of Au Pierrot Gourmet, a tiny second-floor French restaurant on Notre Dame Street, whose chef and proprietor, Jean-Louis Larre-Larouille, had served as a bodyguard for Charles de Gaulle during World War II. Jean-Louis owned no shoes, only bedroom slippers, and he never left his restaurant.

By day he peeled tiny potatoes and watched televised soccer. By night he zealously patrolled his fiefdom, a mad monarch behind his ramparts, growling at customers who did not speak French or, even worse, did not order his daily specials. If a patron complained that the soup was too salty, which it often was, he’d reply, “This is not a hospital, monsieur.” Then he’d throw him out. Even today I can recall the garlicky taste of his Gaspe lamb, cooked on a wood-burning stove. And I grieve that Jean-Louis returned to France and died penniless.

Had Au Pierrot Gourmet not closed, it is surely where Françoise (I’m more comfortable with the pseudonym) and I would have ren-dezvoused. A more than satisfactory alternative was Le Paris, a storefront bistro on Saint Catherine Street where we had eaten our first meal together as a reviewing team—and, for that matter, one of our last. The truth is that we rarely dined with each other while working, even though we pretended we had, because we agreed on nothing. We took others to dinner and wrote as though we had dined together, a faux spin on a faux marriage. I always thought of it as the culinary equivalent of separate bedrooms.

Le Paris was then and still is totally bourgeois, a place one might find across the street from the train station in an arrondissement of Paris where tourists do not go. It has dark red tablecloths, a linoleum F O R K I T O V E R

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floor, and a woefully inadequate coatrack by the front door. (Regulars know there is a supplemental rack by the toilets.) My eye was immediately drawn to a single significant change: the curtains on the broad picture windows, once resolutely drawn to deter the eyes of passersby, were open. After our meal, I asked Guy Poucant, the proprietor and son of Maurice, who opened Le