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

The three little salads that made up my first course were better than the three little salads I invariably sample when I make my first pass through a Sunday buffet line, but that’s as much praise as I can muster. The short rib was a mere morsel, an Eve-sized portion consist-F O R K I T O V E R

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ing of one rib. It was tender, meaty, and fatty, so I suppose a single rib was Waters’ way of saying that fatty meat is fine if you don’t eat too much of it. It came with a mild green sauce that reminded me of South American chimichurri. For all I know about Tunisia, it might be in South America. The pie—okay, it was a tart—had a nice, buttery crust.

I didn’t leave happy. Or full. I had eaten a perfectly satisfactory but oddly perfunctory meal, one brimming with rationality but devoid of entertainment. I understand that Waters has become a mother figure to all of us, a voice of responsibility, but even meals at home with Mom had more laughs than this one.

“Where’s Todd?” I asked the waiter as he led me to my table.

By saying only his first name, I hoped to present myself as an intimate friend, a confidant of the chef. I’ll do anything to get waiters to talk.

“He was in earlier,” the waiter replied.

I was surprised. English has so many restaurants, I figured there wasn’t much chance of him being at this particular one.

“Why did he leave?” I asked.

I already knew the answer. Celebrity chefs don’t mind being in their restaurants, providing they don’t have to stay long. For them it’s like stopping in at a book-signing or a charity event.

“I don’t know,” was the reply. “He came in, yelled at all of us, and left.” Olives, in the Charlestown section of Boston, a few blocks from Bunker Hill, is English’s flagship restaurant. The original opened in 1989, a block from its current site, with a no-reservation policy. It was such an immediate sensation that lines formed, filled with outsiders who would not ordinarily have been welcomed on the mean streets of what was then America’s most racist community. I always believed Olives was a significant influence in altering Charlestown from the redneck ghetto it was into the yuppie enclave it has become. Say what you will about yuppies, at least they’re friendly. These days Olives accepts reservations, charges $15 for valet parking, has doubled in size, and presents an elegant countrified ambiance. The clientele, being from Boston, tends to dress in shorts and flip-flops.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

My meal was a mess. The famous black-truffle-and-foie-gras flan was ice cold in the middle. The accompanying sauce was warm. This caused my innocent dinner guest to ask if English was trying to make a point by contrasting hot and cold. The only point this dish made was that the hot-appetizer station wasn’t very skilled at reheating food. Obviously, English hadn’t yelled quite enough.

Black olive dumplings stuffed with creamy goat cheese were wickedly rich, as the food here so often is. Two of us couldn’t finish a half order, which led me to ask the waiter if any person had ever downed a full order by himself. He said, “It’s insane to try.” Absolutely disastrous were the “handcut pappardelle noodles,” a puddle of flour and goo.

Roast pork, cleverly accompanied by fig jam, was unbelievably overcooked, a few degrees from dust.

As bad as Olives turned out to be, it left me rapturous compared with dinner at Rocco’s on 22nd, of The Restaurant fame. This was the series that turned waiters into household names and made a cult figure out of Rocco DiSpirito’s mother, Nicolina. She threw her heart, her love, and her frail little body into the labor of making meatballs for her son’s restaurant, which would have been wonderful except they weren’t very good. They’re more like underspiced miniature meat loaves.

Four of us went on a Saturday night in August, just after the final episode of the first season was aired. Because DiSpirito knows me, I sent my three friends in first to see if he was there.

Number one said, “I didn’t see Rocco.” Number two said, “I didn’t see anybody working there I recognized from the TV show.”

Number three said, “I didn’t see anybody I’ve ever seen in New York before. Everybody is from out of town.” I asked our waitress, a small black woman wearing an oversize belt buckle that read goomba, why Rocco wasn’t in the kitchen. “He’s busy doing press because of the show,” she replied.

She told us he stops in a few times a week to “check things out.” Clearly, food preparation is not on his checklist. In a city where the standards of Bronx-Italian cooking aren’t particularly high to begin with, F O R K I T O V E R

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Rocco’s on 22nd served some of the worst red-sauce dishes I’ve ever encountered. After tasting the strip steak alla pizzaiola, absolutely unrecognizable as beef, I swore I’d never eat meat in an Italian restaurant again.

That vow lasted less than a week. Soon I was lurking outside Mario Batali’s Babbo, awaiting the arrival of friends. I planned to repeat the scouting mission so successful at Rocco’s on 22nd, send them in as forward observers. My scheme failed when the restaurant’s wine director, David Lynch, spotted me and came outside to ask what I was doing aimlessly walking up and down. I made some feeble excuse about loving fresh air, which I don’t, and asked him if Batali was in the kitchen.

“He won’t be here tonight.Too bad. It’s his day off,” Lynch said.

Critics are almost always given complimentary dishes once they’re spotted, and mine was pig’s-foot milanese. Snicker if you will, but Italian oddities that almost never find