Introduction

I’m sitting cross-legged in the bush with Charlie, deep in the Mekong Delta, drinking Vietnamese moonshine from a plastic cola bottle. It’s dark, the only light coming from a single generator-powered lightbulb, and on the tarpaulin of stitched-together fertilizer and rice sacks laid out on the hard jungle floor in front of me, dinner has just been served: a humble farmer’s meal of clay-roasted duck, duck and banana-blossom soup, salad, and stuffed bitter melon. My host, affectionately referred to as ‘Uncle Hai,’ sits to my left, his right hand clutching my knee. Every once in a while he gives it a squeeze, just to make sure I’m still there and that I’m having a good time.

     I am having a good time. I’m having the best time in the world. Across from me, a ninety-five-year-old man with a milky white eye and no teeth, who’s wearing black pajamas and rubber sandals, raises a glass of the vicious homemade rice whiskey and challenges me to yet another shot. He’s a war hero, I have been assured. He fought the Japanese, the French; he fought in the ‘American War.’ We exchange respectful salutations and both hammer back a shot.

     The problem is, nearly everybody at this meal is also, apparently, a war hero. The delta was an incubation chamber – a hotbed of VC activity during our country’s time here – and everybody, one by one, wants to have a drink with me. Grampa, directly across from me, his legs tucked comfortably under his body like a supple sixteen-year-old’s, has raised his glass in my direction six times already, fixing me in the gaze of his one unclouded eye, before knocking back another shot. Almost immediately, someone else tugs on my sleeve.

     ‘Please, sir . . . the gentleman down there . . . he is also a great war hero. He would like to drink with you.’

     I look down the length of the makeshift picnic blanket to a tough-looking guy, fortyish maybe, with thick neck and forearms. He’s staring right at me, not shy at all, this one. He’s smiling, too – though not exactly the same warm, friendly smile Grampa’s been giving me. This smile says, I’ve killed a few of your kind, you know. Now, let’s see if you can drink.

     ‘I’m right here, Cool Breeze,’ I say, trying not to slur. ‘Come and get me.’ Then I give him my baddest-ass Dirty Harry, jailhouse stare while I drain another glass of what I am quickly coming to believe is formaldehyde.

     Three Communist party officials from the Can Tho People’s Committee, picking at salads with chopsticks, watch with interest as the silly American, who came all this way – by plane, by car, by sampan – to eat clay-roasted duck with a rice farmer and his family, slugs back his twelfth shot of the evening and looks worriedly around the clearing at all the other war heroes waiting to do the same. There are about twenty-five men crowded around the tarpaulin, sitting with their legs folded tightly, tearing at duck with their chopsticks and watching me. The women serve, looming up out of the darkness with more food, more liquor, and the occasional sharp word of advice.

     Don’t make him carve the duck! I imagine they’re saying. He’s American! He’s too stupid and clumsy! In America, everything arrives carved already! He won’t know what to do! He’ll cut himself, the idiot, and shame us all! A paper plate arrives with a small paring knife and another sizzling-hot duck: head, feet, bill, and guts intact. I position the thing as best I can with burning fingers, wrestle not too gracefully with it for a few seconds, and manage to remove legs, breasts, and wings in the classic French tableside style. I crack open the skull so my friend Philippe can scoop out the brains (he’s French; they like that stuff) and offer the first slice of breast to my host, Uncle Hai.

     The crowd is pleased. There’s a round of applause. Behind me, children are running around, playing in the dark. A while ago, there were only a few of them. But as news of the American visitor and his French friend spread, their number has swelled – as has the number of dinner guests. They’ve been arriving all night from surrounding farms. In groups of two and three, they’ve been coming from the river, pulling up in their narrow boats and disembarking at Uncle Hai’s tiny landing. They’ve walked single file down the packed-silt riverbank, the dried-mud causeway that serves as both jungle highway and levee, part of an intricate, centuries-old irrigation system that extends for hundreds of square miles. Occasionally, a small child will appear at my elbow to stroke my hand or pinch my skin, seemingly amazed at the color, the hair on my arms. There is a look of absolute wonder and confusion on his face, as if, perhaps, older friends dared him to go pinch the Giant American Savage who once bombed and strafed the village, but now comes in peace to eat duck and drink rotgut with these patriotic heroes. A while ago, I had my Sally Struthers moment, posing for a photograph with about twenty of them, before allowing them to chase me around the clearing with a lot of fake Hong Kong martial-arts moves, then letting them tie me up with a length of twine – to much squealing of delight.

     The duck is a little tough, and smoky-tasting from the mound of burning straw it’s been cooked in; and the Mekong whiskey is going down like drain cleaner. I’m worried about what I’m going to do when all this alcohol hits me, how I’m ever going to get back on that narrow, wobbly boat in the middle of the night, make my way downriver through the absolute blackness of the jungle, disembark (while still retaining verticality) across a bamboo and mangrove monkey bridge to a sleepy Stone Age hamlet, then, in a shared car, bounce over twisting narrow jungle track and shaky wooden bridges to Highway 1 and Can Tho without blowing chunks all over the three representatives of the People’s Committee.

     I don’t want to disgrace my clan. I don’t want my gracious and genial hosts to see me stumble or fall. I don’t want to get hauled away from this meal on a stretcher, my head hanging over the side of the sampan, drooling bile into the black water. I’ve got something to prove. We may have lost the war. We may have pointlessly bombed and mined and assassinated and defoliated before slinking away as if it were all a terrible misunderstanding – but, goddamn it, we can still drink as good as these guys, right?

     Looking across at Grampa, who’s refilling his glass while a toddler crawls onto his lap, I’m not so sure. Screw it. I’m having a good time. I smile at the old man and hold up my glass. I like him. I like these guys. Since coming to Asia, I’ve never met such a great group of people. It’s been food, folks, and fun like I’ve never experienced. These are, by Vietnamese standards, party animals – warm, generous, thoughtful, kind – occasionally very funny, sincere in both their hospitality and their fierce pride. I don’t want to leave. I want to do this all night.

     One of the younger war heroes at the other end of the tarp suddenly stands up, and the other guests stop chattering as he breaks into song. Accompanied by a clapped-out guitar, he sings, his palms held together as if praying, looking out over our heads, as if singing to someone in the jungle. It’s beautiful, a heartfelt, sweet-sounding, absolutely haunting invocation, and in the dim light from the single bulb, he looks angelic. No one makes a sound while he sings, but I manage to whisper a question to the translator on my right.

     ‘What’s he singing about?’ I ask.

     ‘It is a patriotic song,’ he says, ‘about the people of this village, the farmers and their families who hid the soldiers and helped them during the American War. About the difficulties they faced. And their courage.’

     ‘Oh,’ I reply.

     I know the song is basically about killing my kind – and not too terribly long ago – but I’m absolutely riveted. I’m charmed. I’m flattered. I have been treated, in the last few hours, with never-before-encountered kindness and respect. Uncle Hai gives my knee another squeeze. The old man across from me smiles and raises his empty glass to me, summons a younger man to refill it, gestures that he should do the same for me. A swollen moon appears from behind puffs of cloud, hangs heavily over the tree line beyond the river. Other guests are arriving. I can hear them in the distance, their sandals and bare feet padding softly along the hardened silt, emerging from the darkness to take places around the tarpaulin.

 

I wanted the perfect meal.

     I also wanted – to be absolutely frank – Col. Walter E. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Lawrence of Arabia, Kim Philby, the Consul, Fowler, Tony Po, B. Traven, Christopher Walken . . . I wanted to find – no, I wanted to be – one of those debauched heroes and villains out of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Francis Coppola, and Michael Cimino. I wanted to wander the world in a dirty seersucker suit, getting into trouble.

     I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung River to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulquería in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.

     Unreasonable? Overromantic? Uninformed? Foolhardy?

     Yes!

     But I didn’t care. I’d just put down a very nice score with an obnoxious and overtestosteroned account of my life in the restaurant business. Inexplicably, it had flown off the shelves. I was paying rent on time for the first time in my life. I had, amazingly, health coverage at long last. I actually had money in the bank and the goodwill of a publisher on my side. After a few months of traveling the English-speaking world, flogging my book, giving the same witless three-minute interview over and over and over again, I was no longer a useful factor in the day-to-day operations of my kitchen. My cooks had long since begun calling me ‘Pinchay Famoso’ and making fun of me when I’d show up slathered in TV makeup after yet another segment showing me warning the public about ‘fish on Monday’ and the ‘perils of hollandaise.’ I needed something to do. I needed another idea for a book – preferably while I was still in good odor from the last one. I may love cooking, and I certainly love the life of the professional chef, but I did not, at age forty-five, forty-six, or ever again, want to find myself slopping out brunches in some West Village café when my knees went completely and my brain turned, finally, to mush.

     ‘How about this?’ I suggested to my editor. ‘I travel around the world, doing whatever I want. I stay in fine hotels and I stay in hovels. I eat scary, exotic, wonderful food, doing cool stuff like I’ve seen in movies, and looking for the perfect meal. How’s that sound?’

     That sounded like a good business plan, right? I’d comb the world looking for the perfect mix of food and context. Upriver in Southeast Asia to eat snakes and bird’s nests, back to La Teste for a bowl of soupe de poisson, scale the mountains of the new haute cuisine – the French Laundry in Napa Valley, I hadn’t eaten there yet! That Arzak guy in Spain – all the cooks are talking about him. I’d look and look, and eventually I’d find the best meal in the world – according to me anyway – and I’d write about it.

     Of course, I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one. I knew how important factors other than technique or rare ingredients can be in the real business of making magic happen at a dinner table. Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life. I mean, let’s face it: When you’re eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the background, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion’s face, you realize that in half an hour you’re probably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better.

     I talk about these mysterious forces all the time with my chef cronies. Nothing illustrates them more than the Last Meal Game. ‘You’re getting the electric chair tomorrow morning. They’re gonna strap you down, turn up the juice, and fry your ass until your eyes sizzle and pop like McNuggets. You’ve got one meal left. What are you having for dinner?’ When playing this game with chefs – and we’re talking good chefs here – the answers are invariably simple ones.

     ‘Braised short ribs,’ said one friend.

     ‘A single slab of seared foie gras,’ said another.

     ‘Linguine pomodoro, like my mother used to make me,’ said another.

     ‘Cold meat loaf sandwich,’ said another, shuddering with pleasure. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

     No one I’ve ever played this game with came back with ‘The tasting menu at Ducasse.’ No one remembers their best meal ever as being consumed jacketed and tied, in a starched dress shirt, sitting bolt upright in a four-star restaurant. That particular combination of skill, technique, prime ingredients, and artistic genius was not really what I was looking for – though I was determined to give it a shot now and again. There are other forces at work in the enjoyment of a truly great meal. Nice crystal, mood lighting, squeeze-bottle-applied sauces, good china, attentive service, spectacular wine – I was already well aware of their strange and terrible powers to seduce and delight. Though not always capable of fully harnessing them myself, I was fully conscious of them. I knew how those things worked, the classic interplay between food and service, the effects of low-wattage peach-tinted lightbulbs, the sound of well-polished sommelier’s shoes gliding across a dining room. The entire food business as show business is what my friends and I have been doing our whole lives. I knew about that like I knew about the physical forces at play in the kitchen: gravity, decay, coagulation, fermentation, emulsification, oxidization, reduction, caramelization. I didn’t want to think about those things. I wanted to detach myself from the hard wiring, the way my whole nervous system becomes aware of every movement in a crowded restaurant, habitually monitoring the busboys’ progress in the neighboring station, eyeing an overflowing bus pan, a backed-up service bar, listening for the sizzle as my fish hits a hot pan in the kitchen.

     I wanted magic. When is food magic? What are the common denominators? Certainly, when food is the result of a brilliant and obsessive personal vision, it can take on mystical, magical aspects. At their best, chefs like to consider themselves alchemists, and some of them, particularly the French, have a long and glorious tradition of turning lead into gold. For what is a humble shoulder or shank or strip of gut if not leaden and unlovely, and what is daube of beef Provençale or osso buco – when every bit of flavor and texture has been coaxed gently by skilled hands – but pure gold? And it’s not just magic for the person eating. It can be magic for the chef as well, seeing that tough, veiny, uncooked hunk of meat and bone going into the oven, swimming in purplish and not very distinguished red table wine, then seeing it, smelling it, tasting it only a few hours later, the sauce reduced, a hearty, thick, mellowed, and wonderful witches’ brew – transformed.

     It’s an understanding of this process that raised the French (and Italians) to the forefront of classical cuisine. It’s why we love them – even when we hate them. Few sane persons enjoy French pop music – or even the French much – but they know what to do with every scrap of hoof, snout, entrail, and skin, every bit of vegetable trimming, fish head, and bone. Because they grew up with that all-important dictum. Use everything! (And use it well.)

     Why is that? Why them and not us?

     The answer is, in many ways, to be found elsewhere in the world – in Vietnam, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco – because they had to. It was not – in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France – as it is not today in much of the rest of the world, an option whether to use the nasty bits. You had to.

     They damn well better have figured out something to do with calf’s face, pig’s feet, snails, old bread, and all those cheap cuts and trimmings, or they’d go broke, starve, never be able to afford the really good stuff for special occasions. Sauces, marinades, stewing, charcuterie, the invention of the quenelle, the sausage, the cured ham, salted fish, confit – these were strategies, the results of necessity and countless experimentation. Coq au vin? Tough oversized bird, marinated in red wine and braised long enough to be able to be chewed. Pot-au-feu? Boiled tongues, tails, bones, and cheap root vegetables. Pâté? Scraps and trimmings and fat, ground up and seasoned and decorated until somebody was interested in putting it in his mouth. Confit de canard? I got no refrigerator and I got no freezer and all these damn duck legs are going bad! Those shrewd and wily French toiled mightily over the years, figuring out ways to make just about everything that grazed, creeped, swam, crawled, or hopped, and every growing thing that poked through soil, rotted on the vine, or hid under dung, into something edible, enjoyable – even magical.

     Long after the arrival of the refrigerator, while Americans ate plastic-wrapped fluffy white chicken breasts and denied even the existence of legs or giblets, secure in the certain knowledge that sirloin, filet mignon, and prime rib were really the only ‘good’ parts of the steer, that everything else was hamburger, the French kept at it like nothing had happened. They’d come to love their hooves and snouts. They’d found something to love in every little bit – if it was done right – and, as with so many cultures on this big planet, they’d come to value, to cherish, the humble, poor man’s fare of their past. Merchandising, once a necessary device for the transformation of the inedible to the edible, had fostered an entire cuisine, an approach, a philosophy, a way of life. And magic was the mainstay of the process – a valuable arrow in any cook’s quiver, even one playing with thousand-dollar-a-pound white truffles and torchons of foie gras.

     Respecting the ingredient may no longer be an economic necessity in much of the emerging world; it is now a pleasure, to be experienced and enjoyed at one’s chosen time and place. When everything is just right, a well-made tête de veau can be not only a thing to be savored for its challenging yet simple combination of flavors and textures; it can, with the haunting power of sense memory, remind us of times and places long past.

     Think about the last time food transported you. You were a kid, had been feeling under the weather all week, and when you were finally getting your appetite back, after a long, wet walk from school in the rain, mom had a big steaming bowl of homemade minestrone waiting for you. Maybe it was just a bowl of Campbell’s cream of tomato with Oysterettes, and a grilled cheese sandwich. You know what I mean.

     Your first taste of champagne on a woman’s lips . . . steak frites when you were in Paris as a teenager with a Eurorail pass, you’d blown almost all your dough on hash in Amsterdam, and this slightly chewy slab of rumsteck (rump steak) was the first substantial meal in days . . . a single wild strawberry, so flavorful that it nearly took your head off . . . your grandmother’s lasagne . . . a first sip of stolen ice-cold beer on a hot summer night, hands smelling of crushed fireflies . . . leftover pork fried rice, because your girlfriend at the time always seemed to have some in the fridge . . . steamer clams, dripping with drawn butter from your first family vacation at the Jersey shore . . . rice pudding from the Fort Lee Diner . . . bad Cantonese when you were a kid and Chinese was still exotic and wonderful and you still thought fortune cookies were fun . . . dirty-water hot dogs . . . a few beads of caviar, licked off a nipple  . . .

     Nostalgia aside, good ingredients are not to be discounted. One tends to remember vividly one’s first really fresh piece of fish, one’s first taste of top-quality beluga, an early encounter with truffles, fresh baby peas right out of the pod, a perfectly marbled prime côte de boeuf, an introduction to fresh morels, or stuff you’d just never tried before and maybe didn’t even know existed, like a hunk of raw o-toro, or sea urchin roe. I wanted more memories like these. New ones. I knew time was running out. I was forty-four years old and I’d been basically nowhere. I was becoming a little slower as a line cook, a little bit crankier. When I got swamped on my station, when it seemed sometimes like every order was coming off my sauté station, I began thinking it a conspiracy. The waiters were sandbagging me! Loading up Pops with sauté items, just to see him sweat. Listen to his knees snap crackle pop when he bends down to that lowboy. Look at him, snarling and cursing under his breath – he’s losing it! While my Mexican carnales soldiered quietly on under mountains of orders, I would rail at the powers that put me in this awful spot. It was getting to me: the pressure, the relentless nature of feeding that bottomless pit of hungry public, of every day sending out food into the Great Unseen Maw in the dining room, only to have to do it again and again, with no end ever in sight. Even my expediting was suffering. I hate admitting this. Because when you’re done as an expediter, you are truly fit only for the glue factory (or a consultant’s job). The realization came on a busy night at Les Halles, when after screaming loudly, ‘Fire table eight!’ my Bengali runner, Mohammed, gently nudged my arm and whispered tactfully, even pityingly, ‘No, Chef, it’s table seven.’ I almost cried. My eyes actually filled. I was losing it.

     What the hell. I’d eat my way around the world, right? Fearlessly, I’d look for magic in Vietnam, Cambodia, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco – and anywhere else that occurred to me. There would be nothing I would not try. Okay: one thing. My wife, Nancy, already unhappy about me leaving her behind while I flew around the world, told me flat out, ‘I hear of you scooping the brains out of some cute little monkey’s head while he’s still alive? It’s divorce court. Got it? And try to lay off the dog and cat. You do still have a conscience, right?’

     No problem. The novelty value of tormenting a little monkey (not to mention the risks of some simian spongiform bacteria) did not, to my mind, offset the cruelty factor. I don’t know if that even qualifies as a meal.

     I would, however, revisit Japan. Do it right this time and try that poisonous blowfish I’d heard about. In France, I’d eat an oyster, fresh out of the water, from the same oyster beds where I’d had my first as a kid – and see if there wasn’t some magic to be had there. I wanted to find out if all my cogitating on memory and context was on target or not. I’d go to rural Mexico, to the little town in the state of Puebla, where all my cooks come from, maybe have their moms cook for me, find out how come they’re all so damn good at what they do, what the roots of their particular kind of magic powers might be.

     When I told my boss at Les Halles, José, about my plans, and that we’d be needing a new chef de cuisine while I bopped around the globe, there was not the weeping and rending of garments and the ‘Oh my god! No! Noooo! What will we do without you?’ that I’d been secretly hoping for. The first words out of his mouth were, ‘Ah! Then you must go to Portugal. I will call my mother and tell her to start fattening a pig.’ I cleared my schedule, prepared to cut myself loose from everyone and everything I knew and loved.

Full Disclosure

Here’s the part where I reluctantly admit to something about which I’m deeply conflicted – even ashamed. I’d lie about it if I could. But you’re probably going to find out about it anyway, so here’s a little preemptive truth telling: Almost the entire time I would travel, there would be, somewhere in the vicinity, at least two people with digital cameras. They’d be wearing headphones. One set of phones would be recording, or at least monitoring, every word, curse, and belch issuing from my mouth. When I went to the bathroom, I would have to remember to turn off the little clip-on mike attached to the transmitter on my hip. I had, you see, sold my soul to the devil.

     ‘We’ll follow you around,’ said the nice man from the television production company. ‘No lighting equipment, no boom mikes, no script. It’ll be very inobtrusive. Just be yourself.’

     ‘It’ll be good for the book,’ said my editor.

     ‘We’ll take twenty-two episodes,’ said – God help me – the Food Network.

     Okay, it would make things easier. In Russia, for instance, when I wanted access to a Mafiya nightclub, it helped to have television producers from New York Times Television making the arrangements. The words New York Times, particularly when traveling in Communist countries like Vietnam, or in de facto dictatorships like Cambodia, tend to open doors that might otherwise remain closed.

     But you want to know what it’s like making television? Even a completely nonscripted, cinema verité, make-it-up-as-you-go-along travel and food show, where you do whatever the hell you want and hope the cameras can keep up? It’s being poked in the head with shotgun mikes so often, you feel like the leading lady in a late 1970s Ron Jeremy flick. There is no halfway. You don’t, it turns out, sell out a little bit. Maybe you thought you were just going to show a little ankle – okay, maybe a little calf, too – but in the end, you’re taking on the whole front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers on a dirty shag carpet.

     There’s a punch line to a joke – ‘We’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over price’ – that fairly describes my predicament. I sold my ass. When I signed on the dotted line, any pretense of virginity or reluctance – of integrity (I don’t even remember what that is) – vanished. It means when the shooter says, ‘Wait a minute,’ you wait to enter the restaurant, jump in the river, or light a cigarette, so he can get the shot. When they want you to enter the restaurant again, shake hands with the owner, tell him how delighted you are to be eating fish head at his establishment – even though you just did that five minutes ago, when you meant it – you do it.

     I’ve had a lot of fun trashing Emeril and Bobby and the Food Network’s stable of stars over the last few years. God, I hated their shows. Now I’ve gone over to the dark side, too. Watching Emeril bellowing catchphrases at his wildly barking seal-like studio audience, I find myself feeling empathy for the guy. Because I know, I think, how it happened. One sells one’s soul in increments, slowly, over time. First, it’s a simple travel show (‘Good for the book!’). Next thing you know, you’re getting dry-humped by an ex-wrestler on the Spice Channel.

     I don’t want you to think I don’t like the camera crews that followed me around the world. As TV people go, they were pretty damn cool. Most of them had been shooting documentaries in hospital emergency rooms and trauma units before coming aboard my project, so they knew how to stay out of the way in crowded kitchens and how to behave around people with knives. They ate the same terrifying food. They stayed in the same at-times-septic hotels I did. They braved minefields and roadblocks to get their shots. They stood close, cameras running while, drunk off my ass, I wildly and irresponsibly discharged automatic weapons and high explosives. They froze when I froze, suffered the antimalarial drugs, the food poisoning, the bugs, the vegetarians that I had to. When challenged by locals to contests involving tequila, they did not let the side down. As I, from time to time, crawled, vomiting into some drainage culvert, so did they. They, too, were showered with blood, watched pig-fisting, throat-slitting, force-feeding – and filmed every second. They managed to shoot all day in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen without causing injury to themselves or others. And they did it with considerable good humor. But when you hear me carping about how lonely and sick and frightened I am, holed up in some Cambodian backwater, know that there’s a television crew a few doors down the hall. That changes things.

     All told, however, the writing of this book has been the greatest adventure of my life. Cooking professionally is hard. Traveling around the world, writing, eating, and making a television show is relatively easy. It beats brunch.