The Man Who Ate the World (8 page)

Eric nodded sagely and thought for a moment. “What are the odds?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean is it 1,000 to one that you’ll die? Is it 2,000 to one?”

“I don’t know. I suppose the odds are even longer than that. A huge number of people in Japan eat it every year and the number is growing. Relatively few of them die. So . . .”

He called over the maître d’, a Japanese-American woman called Jo, and asked her if the restaurant served fugu.

She shook her head. “You need a license to serve fugu, and we don’t have a license.”

“So I’d have to go to Japan?”

“I guess so,” Jo said, humoring him.

Eric smiled. “What do you think the odds would be on dying?”

Only in Las Vegas.

I
had one last stop before returning home, a place called Lotus of Siam, which is reputed to be the best Thai restaurant in America. Weirdly, the best Thai restaurant in America is not located in one of the overstuffed, marble-clad hotels on the Strip. Instead, it’s in a mall on East Sahara Avenue, fifteen minutes away. Still, if it was the best of anything, I surely had
to be there. I checked my bags at the airport, picked up a cab and, declining the driver’s kind offer to supply me with a hooker for the night from the glossy catalog he kept on his dashboard, drew up outside Lotus of Siam.

It reminded me of the car park out back of Freddie Glusman’s place: It was another lovely spot in which to dump a dead body. Apparently in the sixties, when this low-rise mall was first constructed, it was the height of fashion. Retailers were desperate to be there. Now, most of the storefronts, which occupy a long, inward-facing square, are dilapidated and broken down; Lotus of Siam is a little better appointed than most, but even so, it is hardly a classy spot. This made a curious kind of sense to me. It is in the nature of any ethnic restaurant in America named “the best of” anything that it should be in a hard-to-reach spot in an unlikely town. There was indeed something absurdly intrepid about making the cab ride out here just to check on the quality of a Thai green curry. Unsurprisingly, this had led to a certain kind of hyperbole, some of it absurd.

A couple of nights previously, I had mentioned to the maître d’ of a restaurant where I was having cocktails that I was going to Lotus of Siam.

“Is it the best Thai restaurant in America?”

He looked at me very seriously, through his wire-framed glasses. “It’s the best Thai restaurant in the world.”

I took a deep breath. “Don’t you think,” I said slowly, “that the best Thai restaurant in the world might actually be in, say, Bangkok?”

He shook his head slowly. “You’ll see.”

After that conversation I wasn’t expecting much, and inside, I wasn’t disappointed: scuffed carpets, polystyrene tiles on the ceiling, a little varnished wood that was in desperate need of a touch-up and, in the middle, a large buffet, with dishes kept warm in aluminium containers over guttering flames. Because of the time of my flight, I had decided to go early, but even at the ludicrous hour of 11:30 a.m. for lunch, it was packed.

To be fair, I can see why. I had a lovely crunchy salad of minced sour
sausage, peanuts and puffed rice dressed with chili, ginger, and lime juice. I had thin, dark, chewy slices of marinated beef that they described, reasonably enough, as a homemade jerky, and then a pork stew in a dense sauce with the fiery heat of chilies. It was all very nice. But the best of anything? Just to be sure, I ordered a chicken green curry, a dish I knew well. It was as good as many I had eaten in London, but it was no better and certainly not the best. There were only two options: Either Thai restaurants in the U.S. are staggeringly poor, or Lotus of Siam, an admirable restaurant serving very good food at reasonable prices, had been hyped beyond all human understanding. I tend toward the latter.

And yet I had enjoyed my meal here more than almost any other in Vegas, and for two distinct reasons. Firstly, I could not escape the fact that it had been eaten in a dusty town in the middle of the desert. Lotus of Siam felt like a part of Las Vegas; not the Vegas of slots and showgirls, but the other one, which lies beneath all of that, the old-fashioned, hot, sweaty frontier town where everybody is striving to make a go of it against the odds. It had struck me, as I moved from linen-covered table to linen-covered table, that the success of the new breed of Las Vegas restaurant now lay in its ability to transport you from the city in which it was located to somewhere else entirely, by sheer weight of excess. That dislocation I had experienced so acutely at Bouchon had actually been present at all the places in which I had eaten. In order to make you think that Las Vegas was now a really sophisticated place, they had to make you stop thinking about Las Vegas altogether and they had done so pretty successfully. Lotus of Siam wasn’t like that. You could never forget it was in a crappy old strip mall on the edge of town.

The second reason I had enjoyed my meal was rather more basic than that: I had paid for it myself. I had slipped my credit card out of the warm leather slot where it had sat unmolested for so many days and had used it to settle the bill of $38.72, including tip. Freeloading might have been entirely justified in Vegas. Doing anything other might well have seemed foolish. But the mechanics of it couldn’t help but detract from the experience. It made me a supplicant. It robbed me of control.

When I was eating on the house I was always somebody’s bitch.

That was something I didn’t like. Somehow, from now on, I would have to pay for every meal myself. Of course it would be expensive, but if I didn’t do that, I would never find the type of experiences I was hunting for. I would never understand what was happening out there. The journey would be wasted. It was time to return to London, consider the finances, and then head off again in search of dinner.

I couldn’t just go to any old place, though. Yes, I had already identified lots of cities that were worthy of my attention, but if I was going to start lifting my own credit card in anger I needed to head someplace where money was what mattered, where money was the universal language. I thought about this but knew pretty quickly what I was going to do. A little over a century ago my forebears had fled the Russian Steppes, pursued by the Cossacks. Well, now I was going back. I was going to Moscow. Everything I had read of those years had led me to understand that the Jews of Russia ate very badly around the turn of the last century; a diet composed mainly of sugar beets, potatoes and, if they were lucky, chicken fat. That was something for which I intended to make amends.

_______________

^*
U.S. dollar amounts appearing in parentheses represent the exchange rate as of November 2007.

M
y plan to pay my own way was not going well. I had been chauffeured to the Kempinski Hotel hard by the Moskva River in a shiny black people carrier. My suite there boasted a bed the size of Kansas, and from the windows I could see both the Kremlin and the absurd onion domes of St. Basil’s Basilica. I had hot and cold running concierge, access to the indoor swimming pool, and a free newspaper every morning. It should all have been costing me $1,500 a night. Instead I was getting it for free.

This had not been my intention, or at least not at first. I really did mean to pay. Then, while still in London planning my trip, I was invited to meet Janina Wolkow, and it all went wrong. Janina is the twentysomething daughter of Alexander Wolkow, a Muscovite restaurateur who owns the three most expensive Japanese restaurants in a city so obsessed by sushi that even the Indian restaurants serve it.

In London’s Mayfair, Wolkow owns Sumosan, which his daughter manages. A mutual friend said she was the person I should talk to about Moscow. Janina invited me to lunch at her restaurant. She fed me lobster salad, and sushi rice topped with seared foie gras, a desperate combination of carbohydrate and luxury fat that made me mourn the
unnecessary sacrifice of a blameless goose. Janina told me she would be happy to help. She proffered another plate of sushi, this time topped with truffle mayonnaise, and said she could direct me to all the best restaurants in the Russian capital and that her father would be delighted to introduce me to the city’s leading restaurateurs. Without pausing for breath she said, “And when are you going to review my restaurant?”

I chewed on the swab of warm rice and buttery, truffled salad dressing. I understood that she was looking for some form of quid pro quo. I could see her point. I explained gently, swallowing hard, that Sumosan, at an easy £70 ($143) a head, might be too expensive for my newspaper’s liberal, often puritanical, readers.

“We do a cheap lunch,” she said quickly, and she fixed me with a fierce glare.

And so, a few weeks later, I found myself in Sumosan with a friend, reviewing the cheap lunch. Happily there was no more foie gras sushi. Instead there were bright clear broths with thick slurpable noodles, and crisp tempuras. There were pristine sushis and sashimis, black cod in miso, a white chocolate fondant, and green tea ice cream, and I liked it all very much. I said so in my column. At £22 ($45) a head, I said it was good value.

It was the day the review appeared that I began to worry. What was I doing reviewing Sumosan? The restaurant had been open for four years, and many of the reviews were less than admiring. (One said the food was generally “without merit or taste”; another described the “funeral pall” of the room; a third said it was the kind of place frequented by “young girls and older men.”) Had I been dishonest then, when I said I liked the Sumosan lunch? No, I was certain of that. I really did like it. But would I have bothered to review it had I not been looking for some sort of assistance? Again, the answer was a firm no. Finally I faced up to the truth: The moment I became involved with the Moscow restaurant business I had started working to a different set of principles; unconsciously or otherwise, I had recognized that accommodations needed to
be made, that it was not a place for scruples. I had become Muscovite in my methods.

I certainly knew by then that Moscow was not like other restaurant cities. I had spoken to a French chef who, for a few years, ran the kitchen of a high-end Muscovite restaurant, the kind of place where, he said, “it wasn’t uncommon to see someone drop a $500 tip.” He told me about the armed security men outside the doors and said that, while he had never experienced any problems, he knew the owner had been pressured by criminal gangs. “The place was a money machine,” he said. “It was turning over $11 million a year, and a million of that went straight to the Mafia.” For obvious reasons, he asked not to be named.

An experienced London restaurateur told me (again, on condition of anonymity) that he had investigated setting up in Moscow but had quickly abandoned the idea. “I got pressure when I went there. People came to see me. They said, ‘You will use us as your suppliers or else.’ I left town.”

Others told me that Moscow was nothing like this anymore; that it might have been chaotic back in the midnineties when the crime syndicates were fighting one another for control of the city, but it was a different place now. Just to be sure, I entered four words into Google. They were: “restaurant owner,” “Moscow,” and “murdered.” The result was startling. In the previous few weeks two restaurant owners had been shot dead. Pavel Orlov, the owner of a chain of restaurants, had been found murdered in his apartment on Udaltsova Street, two bullet holes in his back.

Ilgar Shirinov, the owner of a restaurant called Olymp, had been killed with his bodyguard when the Toyota Land Cruiser they were traveling in was sprayed with bullets. Law enforcement officials said Mr. Shirinov’s death was linked to his “professional activities.” It spoke volumes to me that these killings warranted no more than a paragraph each in the Moscow press. Around the same time, the campaigning Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was killed by a hit man, as were a bunch
of bankers. The
Financial Times
was moved to run a long report about the return to the bad old days of business-motivated assassinations.

I became nervous. The plan had been to go to Moscow for a bit of dinner. I was thinking blinis, smoked fish, maybe a little vodka. I wanted to see how the cheerful new capitalists of the new Russia liked to eat out. Instead, it appeared I was heading to Chicago circa 1929. It became clear to me that I needed a good hotel, ideally, one with scary, armed heavies at the door. The problem was that the authorities in Moscow had gone out of their way in recent years to close down all the mid-range places so they could be replaced by expensive business hotels. Those were way out of my league.

Fully inculcated now into the ways of Moscow, I knew immediately what to do: I had to make use of my connections. I asked Janina Wolkow if her father might be able to get me an advantageous “press rate” at one of the hotels where he had a restaurant.

She called me two days later. “He has a permanent suite at the Kempinski,” she said, naming the most expensive hotel in town. “But he doesn’t need it while you are there. You can have it for free.” In Las Vegas I had worried that receiving free meals might make me a creature of the restaurateurs. Now, in Moscow, I was allowing one of them to put a roof over my head. Weirder still, it seemed like the only sane thing to do.