The Man Who Ate the World Read Free Page A

just one star when he had hoped for two. The second of his stars had gone instead to The Spotted Pig, a New York take on the British gastro-pub, of which he was co-owner.
    “I love the Spotted Pig,” he said. “I adore the Spotted Pig. But a Michelin star? Geddouta here.”
    I asked him what he thought of the awards in general. He shrugged. “What you have to understand is that in the late eighties, three Michelin stars became nothing more than a guarantee that the ultrarich could eat the same food anywhere in the world.”
    I liked Batali. I particularly liked the smooth olive oil gelato he now served me. But I didn’t want to believe him. Surely this was just sour grapes? Surely the revolution in high-end gastronomy that was sweeping the world was about more than merely satisfying a particular clientele’s hunger for nothing more interesting than consistency. It had to have produced some truly fantastic restaurants. Didn’t it? Why would those chefs go to all the trouble of opening all those restaurants and sourcing all those ingredients and taking all the time it required to run a kitchen if it was just to serve safe food? There had to be more to it than that.
    That was when it struck me. Somebody needed to chronicle what was going on by mapping this revolution. I had to find out for myself, and in doing so, I realized, I might well find the perfect meal I had dreamed about. This wasn’t the only reason for going out there. There was another motivation, one that, if I’m honest, it had taken me a while to face up to. I had just turned forty and, reaching life’s midpoint, I had begun to wonder seriously whether being paid to eat was a proper way for a grown man to make a living. If I had found the job even occasionally onerous, I could have convinced myself that the thing from which I took so much pleasure also involved sacrifices. But the truth was my job had never been a burden. I enjoyed all of it, even the really bad restaurant experiences. They gave me great things to write about. Occasionally I was asked if there were any downsides to being a restaurant critic and I would reply that anybody who moaned about doing my job deserved a smack in the teeth. I meant it with perhaps a little too much vehemence. The puritanical part of me, the part that had worn down shoe leather as a reporter covering the evil that men do, wanted to be the one to do the smacking.
    In the task I had set myself I sensed a certain redemption. By setting out to investigate the burgeoning new restaurant world I could stopbeing an itinerant eater merely pleasuring his taste buds and become something else: an explorer, the one to record an entire movement. That had to be a virtue. Didn’t it? Plus I could try to answer a few questions about high-end dining. For example, is cookery a craft or an art? How much can we really learn about the world in which we live from the food that arrives on our plate? Is it moral to eat well while others starve? And is globalization, as Mario Batali claimed, threatening to extinguish the flame of unique creativity that has for so long burned in the hearts of the world’s great chefs?
    Justifications aside, I couldn’t think of a better person for the job. At six I had picketed the family home over a lackluster meal. At eleven my enthusiasm for snails had almost led me to burn down a hotel. I had spent my entire life campaigning for proper dinner. I was the ideal candidate.
    What I needed now, though, was a starting point. I wanted to begin somewhere that encapsulated the modern age. It had to be vibrant, innovative, and open to gastronomic ideas. It had to be a city of appetite. It had to be a town that really, really loved restaurants.
    There was only one candidate. It had to be Las Vegas.

 
     
ONE

LAS VEGAS
     
     
     
    T he first time I visited Las Vegas it was to interview a man who was famous because his wife had cut off his penis. It says much for the shape of my career back in the midnineties