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

plate of toasted slices of baguette and a salad bowl filled with chopped black truffles drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with course salt. I am reminded of tales I’ve heard of visitors to the palace of the Shah of Iran who were dazzled by heaping bowls of beluga caviar.

I realize I will never experience another aperitif moment to match this one. Never will I possess sufficient truffles, not unless I turn to crime. I wonder if I should drive back to the little wooded cove of the truffle hunter, get down on my hands and knees, and crawl around looking for fleas.

“So,” I ask Poron, “is it true that the truffle poachers, the braconniers, are tied naked to trees if they are caught?” He has never heard such nonsense. He says when poachers are caught on another man’s land their cars are set on fire.

This does not bother me. I have a rental car.

I continue speculating. “Say the man walking the land that is not his happens to be a simple American tourist, perhaps even a hardworking journalist who has innocently returned to gather information. Would he not be released with a friendly kiss on both cheeks?” He shrugs.

“Perhaps,” he says, “but sometimes they make mistakes.” j a n u a r y 2 0 0 4

C H E E S E

D O N ’ T S A Y “ C H E E S E ”

Dinner consisted of fourteen courses, so nobody was going hungry.

There were twelve of us dining together at Les Celebrities, the restaurant of Chef Christian Delouvrier. The meal was moving along nicely, so efficiently that I briefly regretted not having sufficient time to linger over the crispy duck braised in a ginger-scented sauce gastrique.

I had anticipated a clumsy outing—all those courses, so many people—but I looked at my watch and happily noted that we would be on our way home by eleven p.m. Then I heard something that chilled me, a word that has become as ominous to me as a dark muttering from the pages of Poe. Over the years, all of us have come to dread certain restaurant announcements: “Does anyone here know the Heimlich maneuver?” Or, “Sorry, sir, your credit card has been confiscated.” None, to me, is as unwelcome as this one:

“Cheese?” the captain asked.

I recoiled. Please, please, please! I silently screamed. Please don’t ask for cheese. Cheese was not part of the menu. Cheese was not required after foie gras with figs and foie gras with grapes and lobster with truffle oil and sweet-water prawns with white truffles and codfish wrapped in prosciutto and roe deer from Scotland and, well, I think I’ve made my point. Unfortunately, Les Celebrities has a cheese trolley of which it is understandably proud, one with twenty-six varieties of well-ripened cheese, and I feared that somebody would say yes. Somebody 2 7 4

A L A N R I C H M A N

did. The squeak of the wheels as the trolley approached the table was like a gurney coming for my remains.

Don’t get me wrong. I love cheese, in particular the melting creami-ness of the elusive French Vacherin and the teeth-rattling pungency of the dreadnought Epoisses. I serve cheese in my home, and I order cheese unfailingly whenever I’m dining in France.

I even consider myself something of a cheese expert, one of the best. Maybe I should amend that to: one of the best domestically. I am probably familiar with half the cheeses served at Les Celebrities, which would put me in the top 1 percent of all Americans. In France, I would be a disgrace. Say what you will about the French, they know their cheese. That’s why the cheese trolley works in French restaurants. It comes to the table and diners absentmindedly point to the three or four they want without missing a beat in their conversation.

The cheese trolley, however, is a dining ritual that has no place in the American restaurant, where it is currently making terrifying inroads.

The introduction of a cheese course to a dinner causes it to stretch on until it feels like detention hall.

The problem is not the cheese but the people eating it. While cheese is one of the staples of the American diet—according to the New York Times, 80 percent of all main dishes served in the United States include cheese in one form or another—Americans know nothing about the cheese course. Explaining cheese to them is like explaining baseball to a Frenchman. I used to consider a literary reading the worst form of torment, but now I believe it’s sitting around a table, listening to Americans order cheese.

The captain’s offer of cheese was accepted by one of the women at our table. And so the agony commenced. She settled back for a long cheese discussion. He patiently indulged her. Now, this woman knows food—she’s a well-regarded New York Times food writer—but you’d have thought she’d never experienced cheese in any form but grilled.

She pointed to the cheeses and asked for an explanation of every single one. Then she picked out seven or eight, and as the captain served them, she asked him to repeat his description of every single one.

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After that, the trolley rolled on, and the cheese discourse began anew.

It would have taken more than an hour for everyone who wanted cheese to get cheese, but I didn’t remain to find out. I pleaded illness— mal de fromage—and fled.

I returned to Les Celebrities a few days later to implore chef and management to become the first important New York restaurant to disavow cheese. Chef Delouvrier not only rejected my plea for dining sanity, he said his cheese trolley would increase in size. He said on his last trip back to his native France, in every restaurant where he ate, “we see they are selling cheese to Americans like