There’s a difference, of course, between happily grazing off the fat of the land, as I did during my rambling, overfed childhood, and the slightly more exhausting and perilous life of the professional food tourist. I don’t know when it was exactly during my whirlwind, champagne-soaked junket to Ferran Adrià’s famous restaurant El Bulli on Spain’s Costa Brava that I felt the first slight tinglings of discomfort in my big toe. Maybe it was late that first night, tossing and turning in my fluffy bed back at the hotel, after the first-class flight from JFK to Barcelona, and the chauffeured drive up the coast to a Catalonian castle in the town of Vulpellac. The friendly people there from Dom Pérignon—the sponsor of what one of my woozy companions was already calling “the Mother of All Boondoggles”—served us platters of goat confit, among other things, washed down with so many magnums of rare vintage champagne from the company’s private cellars that my notes on the evening faded into a series of delirious half-sentences and exclamations before disappearing altogether. Maybe it was the next day, after another bountiful, booze-filled luncheon, or maybe it was during my carefully allotted twenty minutes with the chef himself later that afternoon. There were magazine editors from Shanghai in our boisterous little party, and a restaurant critic from Parma, who had a silk handkerchief blooming from the pocket of his neatly tailored suit. Before meeting the most famous chef in the world, I limped along behind this motley group of poseurs, professional aesthetes, and food hacks on a tour of the restaurant’s famous state-of-the-art atelier-style kitchens, where a small army of cooks were busy chopping mushrooms, shucking oysters, and feeding esoteric ingredients into giant, gleaming blenders. A young chef showed us a translucent wafer made of clarified potatoes. It would be used, he said in the hushed, slightly reverent tone of a young scientist discussing the latest rocket ship innovation, to create a “never before seen” mushroom tart.
After the kitchen tour, the assembled junketeers lined up for our interviews with the most famous chef in the world, who received us at strictly allotted twenty-minute intervals on the terrace of a nearby hotel. Adrià was a short, intense man, dressed in his military whites, with the pale complexion common to all hardworking cooks and teeth stained from cigarette smoke. He had a frowning, expressive look on his face, which reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Napoleon, and he examined his phone and stared politely into the middle distance as the same questions were translated for him again and again.
“How does it feel to be leaving the kitchen after all these years?” I asked him, fighting the urge to take off my shoe and rub my gently throbbing toe on a nearby chair.
“I feel a sense of lightness and relief. Maybe you can run a restaurant for forty years, but to run a truly fantastic restaurant for that long, I think it is impossible, the pressure is too intense.”
“If you had one last meal to eat on earth, what would it be?”
“The best Iberian ham and a bottle of Dom Pérignon, of course,” he said with a weary smile, being sure to name-check the sponsor of the evening’s festivities.
It wasn’t my idea to fly over to Spain to write another canned “I Ate Dinner at El Bulli” story, which leading up to the closing of Adrià’s famously remote restaurant at the end of a winding dirt road up the coast from Barcelona had already become a kind of parody of itself. By now, everyone in the food world and beyond knew the legend of El Bulli, and many of us could recite it by heart like nuns chanting the Stations of the Cross: how in the ’70s a modest German couple had purchased a whitewashed, mission-style house in a small beach town called Rojas, in between the moon-shaped blue-green bay and a palisade of cliffs. How they’d named it after their pet bulldogs, and how in the mid-’80s they’d hired Adrià, an anonymous former cook in the Spanish navy, to work in their kitchen. How over the next few years, and more or less out of nowhere, he’d begun to spin out little miracles: glasses of sea smoke scented with salt, tinctures of tomato foam that captured the essence of the best tomato you’d ever tasted, the yolks of raw quail eggs encased, by some wonder of gastro-physics, in pouches of golden sugar that slowly dissolved like spun candy on the tip of your tongue. Cooks and writers had made pilgrimages from around the world to marvel at these creations and to study his radical techniques, which were upending the stuffy, staid world of haute cuisine. Adrià was compared to Dalí, Picasso, and Le Corbusier, and his impossibly complex (and generally impossible to replicate) recipes were collected, with religious care, in a series of giant, glossy volumes.
But now the most famous chef in the world had had enough, and in the spring of 2011, leading up to the restaurant’s final service in late July, a cavalcade of big-foot food writers and nattering TV hosts were making one last pilgrimage up the coast to Rojas, over the famously winding dirt road, to pay their final respects. Jay McInerney had penned his own elegiac, rose-tinted farewell in Vanity Fair. Tony Bourdain was devoting a whole episode of his show to his last dinner at El Bulli, and before the show aired, he tweeted out every one of the fifty courses to his eager, salivating public. Big-money trophy diners were flying in on their jets that spring and summer from around the world (“It’s the sanctum sanctorum, Platty,” one of them told me. “It’s the impossible get”), and corporations, like Dom Pérignon, were bringing in clients, with Adrià’s happy blessing, on an endless series of elaborate junkets and publicity stunts.
Serious restaurant critics, at least those of us still operating under the ancient, slightly tattered rituals of the trade, with our ironic faux reservation names, our dwindling expense accounts, and our discreet though mostly useless disguises, were supposed to be above this sort of thing, of course. We were supposed to righteously turn down the cases of champagne and Premier Cru wines, though they mostly didn’t come our way, and when the representatives of tourism boards from the city of Istanbul, say, or the beer-fed, beef-producing prefectures around Kobe, Japan, called with enticing offers to tour their facilities and sample their delicious products in exchange for a little publicity, we were supposed to politely hang up the telephone.
The editor of New York magazine, Adam Moss, was familiar with this high-minded code, of course. Being a trim, perpetually energetic person who didn’t seem to drink more than a sip or two of wine a week, however, or eat much more than the occasional bran muffin and a few cups of green tea, he’d never been tempted himself by an elaborate junket like this. Which is probably why, when he’d called me into his office a few days earlier, he greeted me with a happy, mischievous grin. The owners of Dom Pérignon champagne had invited him to their version of Ferran Adrià’s last supper, but he had better things to do. Why didn’t I go? When I attempted to protest, he only got more excited about the idea, the way editors often do. It would be a story about the ultimate junket—a satire of the ultimate junket even—and he wanted me to write it that way, while also stealthily producing a fly-by summation of Adrià and his restaurant for New Yorkers who were, of course, desperate for this kind of inside information. It would just be a short weekend trip. The first-class seats were already paid for, along with the Relais & Chateaux–approved hotel along with, according to rumor, a scenic helicopter trip to the restaurant itself, which was designed to generate a maximum amount of publicity (and Instagram hits) from the assembled press, and also to spare the pampered VIPs from having to drive in a convoy up and down the twisting mountain roads of the Costa Brava.
“Helicopters?”
“You’ll love it. It’s the trip of a lifetime!”
“I’m not crazy about champagne.”
“That’s even better!”
“When do you need the story?”
“As soon as you get back. You can start writing on the plane!”
NOT MANY THINGS CAPTURE THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE PROFESSIONAL eating life—the work obligations in an endless stream of luxurious holiday settings, the relentlessly delicious foods, the weirdly seductive combination of happy anticipation (I’m going on an all-expenses-paid trip to Naples to eat pizza!) and quiet horror (how am I supposed to eat all that fucking pizza in three days!)—than the all-you-can-eat, all-expenses-paid road trip. Making the normal gastronomic rounds at home as an eating professional, it’s possible to halfway manage the workaday cavalcade of luncheons and banquets and restaurant tastings with restorative naps, the occasional skipped meal, and the tactic, at a particularly challenging dinner, of having other, nonprofessional eaters happily gorge themselves on your behalf. But there is no escape on the road: time is limited, every market and noodle shop you visit feels momentarily new and exciting, and most of the time it’s only you doing the tasting. “Food-fucked” is the term I’ve heard chefs use when they visit a friend’s restaurant and the kitchen sends out the entire menu, and the same applies to a critic or writer on a working trip through the street food markets of Saigon, say, or the venerable sausage parlors of Lyon. Food-fucked is more or less your permanent condition from the time you wake up bright and early for your sausage breakfast until you stagger into bed late that night.
Many years ago, I visited a famous auberge restaurant run by an eccentric French genius named Marc Veyrat, who’d achieved fame, like Ferran Adrià, for mingling the particular terroir of his home region in the French Alps—wildflowers, indigenous herbs, high-altitude cheeses—with the Adrià-style high-angle molecular gastronomic tricks that were all the rage in the posh dining circles of the early 2000s. His original chalet inn on the shores of Lake Annecy, near the Swiss border, has since, tragically, burned down, but in those days it was a magical place, with soft feather beds and double-sized bathrooms and balconies you could sit out on in the evenings, with your glass of chilled Savoy wine, to watch the ferries and motorboats cut back and forth across the wide green lake. An eccentric figure, Veyrat effected the style of a reclusive rock star who rarely emerged from his state-of-the-art studio, although sometimes guests would see him wearing his trademark John Lennon–style acid-trip dark glasses and tall, conical peasant’s hat, foraging for flowers and herbs in the fields above the hotel.
I was writing a story for a travel magazine on the gourmet inns of Europe, and when I arrived with Mrs. Platt at Veyrat’s three-star Michelin auberge, I’d already dined on roast beef with all the trimmings, among many other delicious things, at a luxury inn in the Lake District of northern England, and on the more classic specialties of the Savoie at another well-known auberge farther down the lake. Mrs. Platt had sensibly stopped eating on the trip long before, but, sadly, I still had a job to do. She’d snapped a picture of me that morning at breakfast, surrounded by crocks of truffled scrambled eggs and cutting boards strewn with local hams, jamming a large croissant into my mouth and looking, it later occurred to me, like a bloated contestant trapped in a nightmare gourmet eating contest. We ordered a full lunch of Veyrat’s richly inventive cooking on the terrace after that supersized breakfast, and I interviewed the chef later that afternoon, after a fitful nap. He spoke in strange, whispering riddles, which were even more confusing when translated into English. When I told him about our delicious breakfast and luncheon and mentioned we’d be staying for dinner too, he regarded me over the top of his spectacles as if I were slightly mad, before saying something to his interpreter, and then, after a polite interval, wandering off into the garden sunlight squinting under the brim of his peasant’s hat. Later when I called to reconfirm my dinner reservation, the kind woman on the other end of the line said, “Our food here is very rich. I don’t know if another meal is a good idea for you, Monsieur Platt.”
During the course of my professional food travels, I’ve contracted a severe case of what one wise barbecue pit master described as “pork bloat” during a short, woozy tour of the famous barbecue joints of North Carolina, a trip that turns out to be as you eat your way slowly westward an anthropological study of the history of American barbecue itself. I’ve had a near-death experience sampling the sperm sac of the deadly fugu fish at the end of a weeklong eating binge in Tokyo, and suffered blurred vision in one of my eyes for weeks after someone who was commenting excitedly on the quality of a soup dumpling down in Chinatown spat a tiny speck of gristle into my eye. One day, in preparation for spending a week in one of the famed pizza academies of Naples, I rode around the crooked cobblestone streets of Naples for a day with a voluble cabdriver named Salvatore who was practicing his English for an upcoming trip to New York. Like all Neapolitans, Salvatore considered himself an expert on the local marinara pies—the particular crispiness (or noncrispiness) of the crust, the sacred ratio of olive oil to tomatoes to cheese. His little cab was decorated with miniature shrines to the Virgin Mary and the Argentinian soccer star Diego Maradona, who spent his glory years playing in Naples. By the end of the day, after we’d visited our fifth pizza joint, he was cheering me on, like I was one of the exhausted players on his beloved Napoli football team, and also a little horrified. “This is a crazy job you have!” he cried as we careened home through the afternoon traffic.
Seeking the culinary wisdom of loquacious cabdrivers is something I used to do on my trips abroad. In Singapore, for instance, the learned cabbies are street food experts who can speak at length on the intricacies of the famous hawker markets and food halls which dot that city like a network of bustling piazzas in a sprawling Renaissance town. Early on as a critic, I thought it would make a fun story to spend the day hailing taxicabs around New York City, politely asking one driver, and then another, to take me to their favorite restaurant. I met Alphonso Compoverde from Ecuador, who took me for breakfast to his favorite Cuban restaurant, on Eighth Avenue, where we sat at the counter with several gentlemen dressed in guayabera shirts, eating braised short ribs and flat, toasty slices of a Cubano sandwich filled with pickles and melted cheese and bountiful pieces of pork. Later I sampled plates of wet, Haitian conch stew, and then a Ghanaian stew called egusi at the African Food Temple, a noble but long-since closed dining establishment on Webster Avenue in the Bronx, where the bathroom was strung with brightly colored tropical flowers and the waiters brought bowls filled with warm water to wash your hands after the meal. Of course, I ate many samosas that day, and I watched real Punjabi roadside tea being poured into paper cups from a great height at a long-vanished gas station on Houston Street, which was torn down many years ago to make room for a glittering condo.
The trip lasted only five hours but felt like a whirligig gastronomic tour of the world, and when it was over, I lay on the couch describing the highlights of the day to my daughters, while crunching horse-pill-sized tablets of antacid. They listened to my strange bedtime story politely, and when I was finished, they digested it in silence for a while. Finally, one of them said, “I don’t think you should eat any more food this week, Daddy.”