A Cook's Tour (12 page)

     I was afraid. Very afraid.

     When I showed up at the cooking school, a whole posse of women was waiting for me: Luis’s daughters Virginia and Visi (also a chef), and three friends, their faces brimming with mischief. I’d compounded the danger factor by bringing along my wife, Nancy, a woman with her own limitless potential for causing mayhem, and I knew, just knew, that the all-male adventure the night before was a trip to Disneyland compared to what was in store for me now. There’s an expression in Spain that translates as ‘a little bit – often,’ a phrase usually invoked before setting out on a
poteo
– what we might call a ‘bar crawl.’ Essentially, the way a
poteo
works is this: You bounce around from one tapas joint to another, eating what they call
pinchos
(the local term for tapas) and drinking
txacoli
, red wine, in measured amounts. Drop in, eat what’s great – and only what’s great – at each particular bar, then move on.

     We had the TV crew lurking ahead and behind us as we set out through the streets of the
parte vieja
, and I was keeping a sharp, worried eye on Nancy, who hated the idea of making a television show, hated being near a camera, and had already taken a serious dislike to the producer for keeping me busy most of the day shooting ‘B-roll,’ meaning scenery, shots of me walking around and pretending I was thinking deep thoughts, while she stewed, neglected, in a hotel room. If the producer elbowed her out of a wide shot one more time, I knew, she was going to sock him in the neck. I’d seen her use that punch before – on a too-friendly woman at a sailors’ bar in the Caribbean. She’d leaned behind me, drawn back, and walloped a much larger woman two stools down, straight in the carotid. The woman went down like a sack of lentils. I didn’t want to see that again. I made out Matthew, the producer, walking backward in the darkness and decided there would be no contest. Nancy could take him with one arm behind her back. Besides, she already had allies. She was now commiserating with Virginia and Visi and their friends behind me. I could hear them all laughing, the other women immediately sympathizing. If things degenerated into senseless violence, I’d just walk away and leave Matthew to his fate. Besides, I was still pissed about the Jerry Lewis incident.

     The girls – that’s how they referred to themselves – were all sharp, attractive, fiercely independent women in their mid to late thirties, happily single and totally unneurotic about sex. When a camera guy, making casual conversation, asked one of the friends if she liked to dance, she shrugged and said, ‘I like to fuck’ – not an invitation, by the way, just a casual statement of fact. I felt, in spite of the lingering potential for violence, reasonably comfortable and among friends. These women acted like . . . well, cooks.

     It takes experience to navigate the tapas bars of San Sebastián the way we did that night. Temptation is everywhere. It’s hard not to gorge too early, fill up too soon, miss the really good stuff later in a haze of alcohol. The first place was a good example: Ganbara, a small semicircular bar with no seats and room for about twenty people standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Laid out in a breathtaking display on clean white marble was the most maddeningly enticing spread of bounty: snow-white anchovies glistening in olive oil, grilled baby octopus salad, roasted red and yellow peppers, codfish fritters, marinated olives, langoustines, pink-red fat-rippled serrano,
pata negra
and Bayonne ham, stuffed chilis, squid, tarts, empanadas, brochettes, salads – and the most awesome, intimidatingly beautiful mountain range of fresh wild mushrooms: gorgeous custard-yellow chanterelles and hedgehogs, earth-toned cèpes, morels, black trumpets. Cooks seared them to order in black pressed-steel pans and the room was filled with the smell of them. Visi cut me off before I started blindly eating everything in sight; she conferred with the cooks for a moment while a bartender poured us small glasses of red wine. A few moments later, I had a pungent mound of searingly hot sautéed wild mushrooms in front of me, crispy, golden brown, black and yellow, with a single raw egg yolk slowly losing its shape in the center. After a toast of red wine, I ran my fork around the plate, mingling yolk and fungi, then put a big forkful in my mouth. I can only describe the experience as ‘ready to die’ – one of those times when if suddenly and unexpectedly shot, at that precise moment you would, in your last moments of consciousness, know that you had had a full and satisfying life, that in your final moments, at least you had eaten well, truly well, that you could hardly have eaten better. You’d be ready to die. This state of gustatory rapture was interrupted by more wine, a tiny plate of tantalizing baby octopus, and a few sexy-looking anchovies. I was at first confused by an offer of what looked to be a plate of fried zucchini sticks, but when I bit inside and found tender white asparagus, I nearly swooned.

     ‘Let’s go,’ said one of the girls, tearing me away from a long, lingering look at all that ham. ‘Next place is famous for fish cakes.’ We walked six abreast down the cobblestone streets, the girls laughing and joking – already best pals with my wife – who speaks no Spanish and certainly no Basque. I felt like part of the James/Younger gang. At the next joint, Luis’s former student recognized me from the street, entered, took one look at the female desperadoes I was keeping company with, and bolted immediately from the premises, badly outnumbered.

     ‘This place is famous for hot food – especially the fish cakes. You see? Nothing on the bar. Everything here is made to order in the kitchen,’ said Visi. We drank more red wine while we waited for the food. I was soon digging into a hot, fluffy fish cake of
bacalao
, onions, and peppers, smeared onto a crust of bread, followed by the even better
morro
, a braised beef cheek in a dark expertly reduced demiglace. Yes, yes, I was thinking. This is the way to live, perfect for my short attention span. I could easily imagine doing this with chef friends in New York, ricocheting from tapas bar to tapas bar, drinking and eating and eating and drinking, terrorizing one place after another. If only New York had an entire neighborhood of tapas bars. The whole idea of the
poteo
wouldn’t work if you had to take a cab from place to place. And the idea of sitting down at a table for
pinchos
, having to endure a waiter, napkins, a prolonged experience, seems all wrong.

     Another joint, then another, the red wine flowing, the girls getting looser and louder. I don’t know how one would translate ‘Uh-oh, here comes trouble,’ but I’m sure we heard it in our rounds as our crew swept into one tiny bar after another. I remember anchovies marinated in olive oil, tomato, onion, and parsley, cured anchovies, grilled anchovies, fried sardines, a festival of small tasty fish. More wine, more toasts. I recall stumbling through an old square that had once been a city bullring, apartments now overlooking the empty space. Past old churches, up cobblestone steps, down others, lost in a whirlwind of food.

     At San Telino, a modern, more upscale place (inside an old, old building), I found a more nouvelle take on
pinchos
. Wine was poured as soon as we entered. I had, I recall, a spectacular slab of pan-seared foie gras with mushrooms – and, glory of glories, a single squid stuffed with
boudin noir
. I hunched protectively over my little plate, not wanting to share.

     More wine. Then more.

     The women still looked fresh. I felt like I’d awakened under a collapsed building, the room beginning to tilt slightly. I was speaking Mexican-inflected kitchen Spanish, which is always a bad sign when wondering if I’m drunk or not – and the girls had only begun.

     After a few more places, I finally called it a night. Somehow, we’d gotten into the tequila by now. I’d seen a chunk of hash cross the bar, there was a fresh row of shot glasses being lined up, and Nancy was looking at one of the crew’s idle cameras like she was going to use it as a blunt object. It was time to go. One seldom leaves a good impression on one’s hosts by suddenly sagging to the floor unconscious.

It’s great, sometimes, to be a chef. It’s even great, sometimes, to be a well-known chef – even if one is well known for things completely unrelated to one’s skill in the kitchen. There are perks. It’s even better when you’re with a better-known chef, a longtime resident of the community in which you’re eating, and you’re looking to get treated well in a really fine restaurant. No one gets fed better in good restaurants than other chefs. And when you’re really, really lucky, you get to sit at the chef’s table, right in the kitchen, attacking a three-star Michelin tasting menu in the best restaurant in Spain.

     Which is where I was, sipping from a magnum of Krug in the kitchen of Arzak, a family-run temple of Nouvelle Basque on the outskirts of San Sebastián, the best restaurant in town, I was assured by just about everyone I’d met – which, of course, meant it was also the best restaurant in Spain, and therefore the world. I’m not going to weigh in on the ‘who’s best’ issue, but I will tell you that it was a flawless, remarkable, and uniquely Basque experience. Yes, yes, there is that other place, where they serve the seawater foam and the desserts look like Fabergé eggs, but I wasn’t going there, so I can’t offer an informed opinion, though I’m happy to sneer at it in principle.

     Chef/owner Juan Mari Arzak was one of the fabled ‘Group of Ten,’ back in the heady, early days of French nouvelle cuisine. Inspired by the pioneering efforts of French chefs like Troisgros, Bocuse, Vergé, Gùrard, et al., Arzak and a few others had determined to move the traditional elements and preparations of Basque cuisine up and forward, refining it, eliminating any heaviness, redundancy, silliness, and excess. He took a much-loved, straightforward family restaurant and turned it into a cutting-edge three-star destination for serious gourmets from all over Europe, a must-see whistle-stop on every self-respecting chef’s world tour. And he did it without compromising, without ever turning his back on his roots or on Basque culinary traditions.

     Luis and Juan Mari greeted one another like two old lions. The chef showed us around his immaculate white-tiled kitchen as if we were guests in his home, sitting down at the table with us while the chef de cuisine, his daughter, Elena, took charge of the cooking. Apologies to Elena – and Juan Mari – but I have to tell you, just to set the scene properly, that later, back in New York, when I raved about the meal I had at Arzak to a tableful of multistarred New York chefs (all of whom had already eaten there), they wanted to know only one thing: ‘Was Elena there? . . . Ohhhh God.’ There is nothing sexier to many male chefs than a good-looking, brilliantly talented young woman in chef whites, with grill marks and grease burns on her hands and wrists. So Elena, if you ever read this, know that thousands of miles away, a tableful of
New York Times
stars were moved to spontaneous expressions of puppy love by the mere mention of your name.

     Elena walked us through each item of food in near-perfect English, apologizing (needlessly) for her accent. The kickoff was pumpkin ravioli with a squid-ink sauce infused with red pepper. Next, little toast points with a puree of Basque sausage and honey, a tiny cup of sheep’s-milk yogurt with foie gras – almost obscenely good. Like all my favorite haute chefs, the Arzaks don’t mess about with the extraneous or nonsensical. Presentations represented the food to best effect and never distracted from the ingredients. The Basque elements were always front and center; you knew, at all times, where you were. There was crayfish with eggplant caviar, olive oil, and parsley, and then an alarmingly shrewd yet deceptively simple creation I’d never seen nor even heard of before: a fresh duck egg, whole, yolk and white undisturbed, which had been removed carefully from the shell, wrapped in plastic with truffle oil and duck fat, then lightly, delicately poached before being unwrapped and presented, topped with wild-mushroom duxelles and a dusting of dried sausage. It was one of those dishes that, while absolutely eye-opening and delicious, inevitably makes me feel small, wondering why I could never have come up with such a concept. Eating it was bittersweet, the experience tinged as it was with the certain knowledge of my own bad choices and shortcomings. How did they come up with this? Did the idea appear like the theory of relativity appeared to Einstein – in dreams? What came first? The egg? The duck fat? It was so good. It hurt to eat it.

     The menu kept coming. A vegetable tart with chestnuts, white asparagus, baby bok choy, and wild mushrooms; sea bass with a sauce of leek ash, a green sauce of fresh herbs, and garnish of one flawless diver’s scallop; wild duck, roasted in its own juices, the defiantly fat-flecked jus allowed to run unmolested around the plate; a duck consommé with roasted tomato. It was one of the best meals I’d ever had. In one of those ‘It can’t get any better than this’ moments, an ashtray appeared, allowing me to enjoy a postmeal cigarette inside a three-star kitchen. Life was good.

     Listening to Luis Irizar and Juan Mari Arzak discuss cuisine, the things they’d accomplished, was like listening to two old Bolsheviks reminisce about storming the Winter Palace. I envied them that they were so good at what they did, that they were so firmly grounded in a culture, a place, an ethnoculinary tradition, that they were surrounded by such limitless supplies of good stuff – and the clientele to appreciate it fully. Would such advantages have, in my time, changed my own trajectory? Made me a better chef? A better cook?

     As another American writing about Spain famously said, ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’