Per Se, one of New York City’s most admired restaurants, serves a tasting menu which is an act of emotional control from a chef (Thomas Keller) in which the diner, masochistically, submits. High above Columbus Circle, in a hushed and ugly dining room, you eat, for an absurd amount of money, tiny, painted meals delivered by rude waiters, who seek obeisance to the cult.
When I reviewed it in 2015, I thought it was a hoax on the credulous. It was not, for me, food, for it has no hint of generosity. It was, rather, anti-food, for people who think food, by itself, is too prosaic. They must have something new; something that is denied to others. The result was both gruesome and a fair revenge.
I thought of Per Se when reading William Sitwell’s The Restaurant: A History of Eating Out. It is, by its nature, incomplete. Most meals are lost to history, for nothing is more transient than food. Even so, it is a curious history of our relationship with eating houses from Pompeii, whose restaurants were preserved, to today, when they are all closed, so it reads like an acting obituary: who knows what will survive? On the wall of a bar in Pompeii it read: “For one [coin] you can drink wine / For two you can drink the best / For four you can drink Falernian [the wine of Mount Falernus]”. Who cannot identify with that?
This book is full of humanising stories. Charles II, for instance, was emotionally dependent on figs. When the Ottoman Empire forbade their export, he begged the sultan to make an exception, which was granted, and two ship loads arrived per year. Read that, and you do not see a king. You see a child.
Per Se, for most of the narrative, was a nightmare long in the future. Rather, there is pleasure. I could smell the street food of the Middle East – long my favourite food — through the pen of the 14th century north African Ibn Battuta who, during what Sitwell calls a 32 year-long “gap year”— often his style fails him — eats fried rice and chicken in what is now Iran. It summoned my favourite restaurant, which is a nameless hole in the wall near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, where Al-Wad Street meets Beit Habad Street, slightly to the right. (I tell you this because I want you to find it.)
Here a man who has probably never heard of Thomas Keller, who could not even be bothered to name his eating house, served falafel, which he fried in front of my eyes, with pitta bread and French fries. Then I wandered through the souk with my falafel sandwich. I have been a restaurant critic for 10 years, and this is the one I remember. He pretends to remember me too, even if I go only once a decade, because he is a gifted restaurateur; as gifted, in his way, as the Roux Brothers. Or likely more gifted.
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