YOU GOT SERVED!
SCROUNGING FOR A TASTE OF WEALTH IN THE GASTRODOMES
By MICHAEL McHALE
June 22, 2008
The Man Who Ate the World
In Search of the Perfect Dinner
by Jay Raynor
Henry Holt
Told by his mother to either eat the slimy slab of mackerel in front of him or leave the table, six-year-old Jay Raynor sulked off, only to be spotted 15 minutes later picketing in front of their London home with a makeshift sign which read "I want a proper dinner." Now, as the restaurant reviewer for The Observer and an established voice among Britain's hyper-competitive food journalists, Raynor is still yearning for that singularly unparalleled dining experience. "The Man Who Ate the World" chronicles his search.
"By setting out to investigate the burgeoning new restaurant world," Raynor writes, "I could stop being an itinerant eater merely pleasuring my taste buds and become something else: an explorer, the one to record an entire movement. That had to be a virtue, didn't it?" So off he went, sensibly confining his search to restaurants of the current epicenters of wealth or culture or both, the revered and starred eateries of New York, Paris, London, Moscow, Tokyo, Las Vegas and Dubai.
During his travels Raynor find some meals of astonishing quality. The pea salad at Guy Savoy in Paris, where every pea is cut in half, is "a veritable hymn to the pea." Yukimura in Tokyo served up course after course of small perfections, culminating with "the richest white crabmeat I have ever tasted, with that curious balance of salt and sweet." L'Astrance presented Raynor with "a dish with two glorious langoustine in a clear langoustine bullion with single leaves of fresh herbs and vivid purple flower petals, looking like a Monet watercolor."
Professional eating of this type, however, is not without its perils: Raynor's marathon day-after-day sessions at the great restaurants of Paris leave him feeling ill and jaded. "Michelin 3-star restaurants day after day after day? How grotesque. How bloody stupid. After lunch at Le Grand Vefour, how very unpleasant. I disliked myself. I disliked high end restaurants. Mostly I disliked my liver, which I was now convinced had the consistency of foie gras."
