Nasty Bits Part 6

Most unforgivably, they have sent Manrique a videotape, surrept.i.tiously filmed from his yard, of his wife and two-year-old child in their home, with a letter warning that they were being watched.

This is a tactic unworthy of the Mafia. Even the Gambino crime family, to my knowledge, rarely if ever stooped to this. This is the kind of activity favored by Central American death squads and Colombian drug gangs, and it's surprisinga"no, it's G.o.dd.a.m.n horrifyinga"to see it in the touchy-feely heartland of political correctness.

But on the other hand, it's ill.u.s.trative of the utter gutlessness and self-delusion of these yuppified, trustafarian true believers. Arguably complicita"as we all area"in their comfortable T-shirts and leather-free footwear (surely subsidized by the underpaid labor of some faraway dictatorship) they toodle over in their sensibly fuel-efficient cars to Sonoma (not too far from their expensive homes) and destroy the small businesses of victims completely uninvolved in their argument. They terrorize a mother and infant child.

I have always felt a strange mix of revulsion and grat.i.tude toward the folks at PETA (who insist that while they support the aims of the supposed splinter faction responsible, they are not comfortable with the means). Personally, I would never buy or wear fura"while other material is available. I choose not to hunt for sport. I find it ugly and pointless. While I have shot rabbits for food, it was not an experience I enjoyed, and I would not do it again. The idea of testing cosmetics on animals seems appallingly, extravagantly cruel and unnecessary. (As opposed to medical testing, which I reluctantly, very reluctantly, accept.) I own and utterly adore a mean, six-pound runt of a cat who I adopted from a shelter, and who essentially runs my household. However annoying or offensive or tone-deaf or silly the PETA folks look at times, I've always been glad they're there, to remind all of us the cost in life and in pain of the luxuries we enjoy. If they choose to picket, to advertise, to educate, to harangue, to use every interpretation of the first amendment to embarra.s.s fashion designers, alter public perception, and change behavior, then G.o.d bless them. This is, presumably, a free country. And if they want to put up posters and billboards mocking Rudy Giuliani's cancer (got cancer?), however grotesque that might be, he's a big boy. And it makes them look far worse than even the most uncharitable view of our former mayor.

But terrorizing a chef and his family? Using what is essentially racketeering and extortion to frighten chefs into changing menusa"in Manrique's case, walking away from a centuries-old Gascogne tradition? This is indefensible, atrocious, and portentous of bad things to come. Already, chefs Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere and Charlie Trotter have made the craven and all-too expedient decision to remove foie gras from their menus, not only knuckling under at the first whiff of opposition, but turning their backs on their peers and their profession when their support is needed most.

I have seen foie gras being produced, the ducks and geese fed in identical fashion to the way that Manrique's suppliers do it. The animals are not bolted to a board. At mealtime, they are summoned or gently prodded, by the same feeder each day, and held between his legs. Their heads are tilted back and a long funnel is introduced into their mouths and down their throats. About a handful of feed is ground in a mill and poured into their stomachs. They do not generally struggle. Often, free of any physical encouragement, they come when summoned. Certainly it is not pretty. Watching the process causes an instinctive awareness of the gag reflex. But then any number of adult film stars cheerfully inspire the same reaction. It is, no doubt, cruelty of a sort. If any time discomfort is inflicted on another living thing defines the word, then that's what it is. But in the full spectrum of cruelty and horror in this wide worlda"and even in our own neighborhoodsa"there is far, far worse.

There is cruelty and neglect and murder readily at hand on Bay Area streets. But it happens to people, creatures of little concern to our clandestine warriors. There is also dog fighting and c.o.c.kfighting. But the people who run those businesses tend to carry guns, and one thing we can be sure of is that the perpetrators of the Manrique extortion don't want any holes shot in their comfortable clothing. They don't want to miss a shift at the health food store. They don't want to do anything that their supporters or daddy's lawyer can't bail them out of later. Rather than risk harm or inconvenience to themselves on the real front linesa"in Burma, China, Africa, or even the streets of Oaklanda"they have chosen to commit the relatively easy crime of extorting a chef and his family. If these people, a.s.sured Hezbollah-like of the righteousness of their cause, were capable of shame, then they surely should be ashamed.

Burglary, destruction of property, and extortion are all felonies. Acting as a group, in concert, in an ongoing criminal enterprisea"as these hateful and hating people inarguably havea"amounts to racketeering. I dearly hope, pour decourager les autres, that when they are caught, they are tried and convicted under federal RICO conspiracy statutes and spend the rest of their lives eating prison turkey loaf. And I offer my support and my sympathy to Laurent Manrique, a great chef, a good man, and a proud Gascon.

SLEAZE GONE BY.

"NEW YORK m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kIN' CITY.".

One used to be able to say that with pride, usually in conjunction with a challenge to whatever tourist had wandered into your orbit, something welcoming and friendly like "Whaddayou lookin' at?!" or, "Gimme a dollar!" With the advent of a strong economy, however, and a crime-busting mayor, more stringent "quality of life" laws, and a number of major corporations eager to pour billions of dollars into redevelopment, New York is becoming a destination resort, offering the same nonthreatening, family entertainment districts as Southern Florida or the "new" Vegas. The way things are going, the city I love will soon present one unbroken vista of theme restaurants, chain stores, Starbucks, and merchandising outlets for the film studiosa"a smoke-free Disney Zone and amus.e.m.e.nt park for every flabby-a.s.sed, no-necked f.a.n.n.y-packer and rube who thinks waiting on line outside the Hard Rock Cafe is a thrill ride. Survival of the fittest has been replaced, judging from the docile herds waddling through our streets in search of T-shirts and theater tickets, by survival of the fattest.

Now I know how the aging gunmen of the Old Westa"Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hick.o.c.k, Wyatt Earp, and their peersa"must have felt, watching the first waves of homesteaders arrive in Tombstone: the creeping Jesuses and Temperance Leaguers, demanding schools, churches, public parks where once thrived wh.o.r.ehouses, gambling halls, saloons. No more whoring and boozing and eye-gouging, cried the new arrivals. An end to the unrestricted discharge of firearms! Well, look at the American West now, friends. One long strip mall.

No single structure personifies what has happened to my city more forcefully than Show World, a one-time temple of sleaze at the corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue: three stories of sin, where one could shoot up in the privacy of a peep booth, watch bruised women with tattoos spread their crenulated thighs on a revolting s.h.a.g-carpeted platform in the "theater," or attend the hourly Live s.e.x show, where dead-eyed junkie couples would bang bony hips together lifelessly, six shows a day. Now? It's a comedy club.

What happened? Times Square was, particularly for a young man with a criminal bent and a few bucks in his pocket, a wonderland of urban exotica. Not too long ago, you could buy a couple of loose joints on the street, then watch a triple bill of Lightning Swords of Death, Three the Hard Way, and Get Carter from the balcony/smoking section of one of a half dozen cavernous, moldering grind house movie theaters, the film's soundtrack accompanied by the hoots and shouts of the other patrons, for whom the theater was not a diversion but a place of business. All those theaters are gone, replaced by the Disney-owned New Victory and, across the street, the Lion King in apparent permanent residence. Where feral young men with b.u.t.terfly knives tucked in their waistbands used to play video games and pinball among the chicken hawks, selling beat drugs and planning felonies, it's now stores selling Warner Brothers action figures and stuffed animals. Where Matty "The Horse" Ianello once ran an empire of clip joints and peep shows and hustler bars, it's Mickey and Bugs who are the baddest dudes on the block.

Up the street on Broadway, where a midget doorman used to escort you up the dusty plaster waterfall into the gargantuan and half-empty Hawaii Kai for flaming drinks to chill you out from all the bad cocaine, and movie marquees once sported t.i.tles like a.n.a.l Rampage III and The Sperminator, there's the All-Star Cafe, a h.e.l.lacious Terrordome of ba.n.a.lity: Tourists and their spotty children chaw haplessly at frozen hamburgers, waiting listlessly for a glimpse of Michael Jordan on one of the gigantic video screens. World Wrestling Entertainment has a store. There's a Gapa"unthinkable a few years back, when the shelves would have been quickly emptied by enterprising sneak-thieves and shoplifters. The MTV studios look down on the Square, attracting doughy teenage girls hoping for a glimpse of one of their nonthreatening hosts. Wasn't rock and roll dangerous once? The hideous Mars 2112 restaurant offers "Martian cuisine" and a virtual reality trip through a "wormhole in s.p.a.ce" to thousands of children and their bored-looking parents where junkies and Johns once frolicked unfettered.

On Eighth Avenue, once called "The Minnesota Strip" as it was prime recruiting for pimps who'd catch impressionable young victims fresh off the bus at Port Authority, the blight continues: The Haymarket Bar, a vicious hustler hotspot where young male entrepreneurs would pick up older Johnsa"so they could rob them at knifepointa"is gone. Lady Anne's Full Moon Saloon, called by Paper magazine's well-traveled bar reporter "The Worst Bar in the World," where the smell of Lysol and vomit distracted one from the recently released convict population playing pool on a warped table in the rear, is now the Collins Bar, with a smart Art Deco facade. You can walk from Fiftieth Street to Forty-second without once hearing the comforting refrain of "Smoke, smoke" or "Crack it up, got it good . . ." The legendary Terminal Cafe, across from the bus station, where at eight a.m. you could enjoy a shot of rye and a draft beer, pulling it to your mouth with a dirty bar towel, is now a parking lot. The Hollywood Twin Cinema, immortalized in Taxi Driver, is now the home to Big Apple Tours, and the terrifying peep show/bookstore downstairs is now a Burger King. In the convenience stores and shops where once were rows of d.i.l.d.os, crack pipes, bongs, and nunchuks, there are only rows of Pringles.

The Lower East Side is worse. At one time a superstore of heroin and cocaine, where customers would line up in the streets for admission to a vast underground empire of abandoned, burned-out tenements converted into fortified rabbit warrens of b.o.o.by-trapped pa.s.sageways (the dark, candlelit peepholes manned by gun-toting guards)a"it's now a neighborhood for the Starbucks generation. And an expensive one. Once the air smelled of burning candles, p.i.s.s, and desperation. Now it smells of CK1. The old name brands (of heroin) proudly shouted out over the ever-present salsa musica"Toilet, Laredo, Try-It-Again, Check-Mate, 357a"have been replaced by Prada, Comme des Garcons, and Tommy Hilfiger.

The meat district? Crisco Disco, the Anvil, the Mineshafta"a former world of unsafe s.e.x, amyl nitrite, Quaaludes, and leather, sandwiched between meat wholesalersa"is now the hottest restaurant district in town.

Tribeca? A former no-man's-land of warehouses where mob-run after-hours clubs thrived, and you could pa.s.s out on a stack of empty beer crates in a rear "VIP" room and wake up near a nodding Johnny Thunders or a gibbering Belushi, greet the cold gray dawn with a shot of Wolfschmidts vodka poured from a Stoli bottle. Robert DeNiro seems to own it all now. You'd think that that might make it interesting. It doesn't. One sw.a.n.k restaurant after another, offices for the cell-phone set. Conversation at bars tends to lean toward back-end points and development deals rather than hijacked loads and who's got the bag.

Upper Amsterdam Avenue? You'd think the former Crack Boulevard would retain a vestige of its glories. Now it's a cl.u.s.ter-f.u.c.k of frat-boy bars, serving girl drinks and Jello shots to a bunch of towheaded projectile-vomiting college boys for whom Ecstasy is a dangerous drug.

New York used to be a tough town. It demanded of its visitors a certain vigilance, a certain att.i.tude. If you didn't walk the walk and talk the talk you could end up naked and walletless in a hot-sheet motel, wondering how the h.e.l.l you got there. The wrong look at the wrong person and you could be looking at the business end of a Sat.u.r.day Night Special (a cheap .38). Buying drugs without getting beat or cut up was an accomplishment, visiting some neighborhoods an adventure. Everyone was always admitteda"but not everyone could stay. Survival required speed, flexibility, volume, aggression. If you stopped to look up at the skysc.r.a.pers or decided to linger over a friendly game of three-card-monte the locals would be all over you like carnivorous beetles. I saw a New York comedian a while back, talking about the Boston subway systema"how they had, to his amazement, cash machines right there on the train platforms. "Of course, we have cash machines on our subway platforms too," he said knowingly, "only we call them 'tourists.'"

Now the tourists are scarier than the locals. They don't even look worried, consulting their maps and adjusting their leder-hosen without fear of discovery. Who's gonna stop them? You can't even spray-paint your name on the subways anymore. Subway cars used to be an exciting showcase for dedicated artists, a place where they could create masterworks two and three hundred feet long that would rocket across the boroughs, write their names in the sky, every wild style "piece" more outlandish and distinctive than the one that came before. Now, every subway car, like every American city, looks the samea" another soulless s.p.a.ce, filled with slack-jawed, sleepwalking bodies, unconnected to anything, running from nothing, to nowhere.

Giuliani's right, of course. That increased "quality of life" enforcement leads to a lower violent crime rate. Let's face ita" you get rousted every time you crack a can of beer on a particular corner, you're less likely to shank a visiting tourist there. But with the diminishing threat of violence comes a deadening torpor, an end to life. Movement and thought become optional.

It's been a while since I felt that adrenaline-juiced exaltation, that "I can't believe I'm still alive!!" feeling that made me proud to be a New Yorker. A half-decaf mochaccino is a pretty poor subst.i.tute. I'm not alone. I can see it sometimesa"the vestigial memory of sleaze pasta"in the faces of my fellow smokers, huddled in the cold outside their gla.s.s and steel office buildings, stoking up on nicotine before reentering their antiseptic, climate-controlled towers. I can see it in the disappointed faces of kids from Jersey, scouring h.e.l.l's Kitchen for a thirty-dollar wh.o.r.e and finding only Tweety and Goofy. "What happened?" they seem to say, their innocent expressions sagging as they put Dad's car back into gear, going home empty. What they came for is no longer there.

PUREAND UNCUT LUXURY.

as much as i love to espouse the "luxuriousness" of simple, often inexpensive things, the idea that a fifty-cent bowl of pho in Vietnam or a properly made bagel in New York can often be more satisfying than a fourteen-course tasting menu at Duca.s.se, sometimes you've just got to spend money. Lots of money.

Sometimes, if you want the very best, you really do have to be the sort of person who can shrug off five hundred bucks for your dinner. Sometimes, a very high price tag does indeed translate directly into quality. Masa Takayama's tiny, thirteen-seat sushi bar-restaurant on the fourth floor of the unimpressive-looking shopping arcade at New York City's new Time Warner building is perhaps the best example of this principle. It's widely referred to as the most expensive dinner in the country. At Masa (as opposed to the less pricey Bar Masa next door) if you want to play, you've got to pay.

And it's worth every dime.

I'll go further. At three hundred fifty dollars per person as a starting point (that's before tax, tip, beverages, and any extras), it's a steal. It's the deal of the century. It's a completely over-the-top exercise in pure self-indulgence, like having s.e.x with two five-thousand-dollar-a-night escorts at the same timea"while driving an Aston Martin.

Imagine if you will: You are one of only thirteen customers sitting at a long, wide, blond hinoki wood counter of such warm, inviting loveliness that you want to curl up on it and go to sleep.

You want to spend the rest of your life rubbing your cheeka"if not your nether regionsa"against it. The nation's most highly regarded sushi master is standing directly in front of you with a knife, a plane grater, a hunk of fresh wasabi root. On both sides of him are casually deposited heaps of the s.e.xiest looking fish you've ever conjured up in your wildest, soy-spattered dreams of sushi heaven. You catch your breath and gape in wonder at the thick hunks of pale, fat-rippled otoro tuna, flown in that morning from Tokyo. Two silent a.s.sistants with shaved heads help the chef, moving among the austere trunks of green bamboo and a simple Stone-Age grill. There's no menu and you don't order, so you have no idea what's coming. But already, as you sit there, blood rushing to your head, lips engorged, hands trembling slightly, saliva thickening, semitumescent, you are absolutely certain that no one, anywhere on the planet, is going to be eating better than you tonight. You are alone, in the nose cone of a rocket headed straight to the epicenter of gastro-culinary pleasure. And there's nowhere you'd rather be.

Not to rub it in or anything, but on my most recent visit to Masa, I had it even better than that. Sometimes it's good to be a chef.

I rolled into Masa with Le Bernardin's four-starred chef, Eric Ripert, on one flank and the well-known author of such professional foodie cla.s.sics as Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhl-man, on the other. Michael had just emerged from a long day observing the kitchen operations at Per Se, down the hall. In case you didn't know, that's Thomas Keller's breathlessly antic.i.p.ated, just-opened temple of haute cuisine. Michael co-auth.o.r.ed The French Laundry Cookbook with Keller, and I guess that experience left a reservoir of goodwill because on entering Masa, we were immediately followed by Per Se's sommelier, who for the full span of the evening kept us lubricated with a progression of jaw-droppingly good wines. I'm talking wines that never in my life will I be either smart enough, or wealthy enough, to order again.

As always, there was nothing on the bar but napkins and chopsticks. A gla.s.s of wine for each of usa"and for chef Takayamaa"and in the hushed, reverential silence, it began.

First, some raw crayfish tossed with cuc.u.mber, served, like all the courses to follow, in simple earthenware vessels designed by the chef. Next, a lovely lighter-than-air softsh.e.l.l crab tempura. Wine. Then more wine. A thick, nearly pureed disk of raw toro tuna, heaped with a giggle-inducing pile of osetra caviar, followed by bonito rolled around radish sproutsa"I think (the wine beginning to kick in now). Then a simmering stoneware hotpot, a bowl of combu broth in which we were invited to dip slices of fresh foie gras and lobster, before shoveling them greedily into our faces. The broth, now beaded with tiny golden pearls of foie gras fat, was then served in soup bowls. Keller's sommelier was pouring heavily, each wine, each course leading beautifully to the next unbelievable thing . . . and then the next. (I'm relying increasingly on Ruhlman's notes here, as I was by this point pleasurably drunk.) Masa put a dark gray slate square down in front of each of us and my favorite part of the meal began: sushi. One piece at a time. Don't even think about soy or dipping sauce or that hideous, electric-green wasabi paste you see in most sushi bars. Each warm, ethereal pillow of rice and fish came preseasoned, with yuzu or sea salt or soy or freshly grated wasabi, as the chef felt appropriate. Fresh water eel. . . then sea eel. . . screamingly fresh mackerel . . . b.u.t.tery, unctuous otoro tuna that seemed to sigh as it relaxed onto the rice in front of me.

The three of us were eating with our hands now, eyes glazed, begging for seconds. All caution, logic, and reason were long gone as our brains spit out endorphins overtime.

More wine . . . more sushi.

Ruhlman tells me that by now I was moaning audibly, muttering things under my breath like, 'Oh yeahhh, ohhh baby . . . mmmmm." I don't apologize. Watching Masa run his scary sharp knife through that pale, p.o.r.nographic-looking tuna, separating and peeling back one layer after another before slicing and applying it to your piecea"the piece you know is going to be in your mouth in just a few more secondsa"is like s.e.x. In fact it's better than most s.e.x. There is no risk of disappointment. Watching Masa pack about eighty dollars (wholesale!) of that incredible once-in-a-lifetime tuna into a single nori roll makes you want to faint.

There was grilled toro ... a grilled shiitake mushroom wrapped around rice that fabulously mimicked fish . . . sea urchin roe so sublime it should probably be illegal . . . scallop, tenderized by Masa's delicate crosshatching . . . sweet clam (had more than a few of those) . . . squid . . . shrimp ... eel brushed with home-brewed soy . . . finally, there was kobe beef that with each bite squirted its pampered, oft-ma.s.saged fat between the teeth.

If the preceding account sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a cheesily written stroke book, don't let that slow you down. Go to Masa. Go now. Book late and show up on time. Sit down, shut upa"and relax. He'll take it from there. Give yourself over to the experience. And enjoy.

Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control.

Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. When that happens to a professional chef, it's a rare and beautiful thing.

Let it happen to you.

THE HUNGRY AMERICAN.

nearly five weeks of hotel rooms, airport lounges, mammoth meals, and equally mammoth amounts of drink, and yet, only thirty minutes out of Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport, I'm nearly levitating off the ground, absolutely giddy with excitement and pleasure. I'm no longer jet-lagged, burned out, or jaded. I'm alive. I'm hungry. And back in Vietnam.

I start grinning idiotically right away, beginning with the warm welcome from Linh, waiting for me by customs, and continue on the ride into town. Out the window are rice paddies, narrow two-story homes decorated with rows of drying corn, gray skies, and bright red banners everywhere, most bearing the Tet (lunar new years) greeting: Chuc Mung Nam Moi; others are flags, yellow star on bright red field, antic.i.p.ating Monday's anniversary of the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party. (Though it's sometimes easy to forget it, this is still a communist country.) The road into town is crowded on both sides with motorbikes, bicycles, and scooters, most overloaded with pa.s.sengers dressed in their Tet best: jackets and ties, children swaddled in blankets or netting, women with scarves and face masks covering everything below the eyes. Everyone is smiling and loaded down with holiday goodies. They carry fruit, flowers, traditional chung cakes still wrapped in artfully tied leaves, shimmering gold paper trees, bundles of bright red joss sticks. The center of the road is for four-wheeled vehicles, meaning that cars and trucks barrel at full speed, headlong into each other's paths down the center line, beeping maniacally, pulling out only at the last second.

I am supposed to head straight to the Sofitel Metropole Hotel to check in, but Linh is a Hanoi native, anxious to show me the best of his hometown, and as soon as we pa.s.s the long, Russian-built Dragon Bridge over the Red River in the inner city, we pull over to an open bia hoi joint.

Eight or nine people sit at low tables on tiny plastic chairs outside what looks like an out-of-business garage. A large square keg of bia hoi, the legendary, fresh draft "bubble beer" of Hanoi, is situated prominently out front by the curb. You won't find this stuff in Saigon. The beer is made fresh daily, trucked or hauled to area shopsa"and quickly consumed. Most places serving it run out by four p.m., and what's trucked outside the city seems not to make it too far south. I haven't even taken a seat yet and the proprietor hurries to fill two gla.s.ses, challenges me to a chug-a-lug. I drain my gla.s.s and we repeat the process two more times before I've even settled into my little chair. The man's wife wants to show me her child, dressed up in his holiday best. An ancient Vietnamese gentleman in a weathered tweed jacket and jaunty beret, smoking from a bamboo pipe at the next table, offers me a puff and another beer.

"Je suis un cineaste," he says. "Nous sommes tout cineastes." He indicates a few other smiling septuagenarians around him. Soon the beer is coming fast and furious. The owner insists on changing to a fresh keg.

"How did you know this place would be open?" I ask Linh. Because of the holiday, most businesses are closed.

He smiles, and points across the tamarind-tree lined street to an old, unpainted building.

"That's the oldest brewery in Hanoi," he tells me, ordering another round of foamy, fresh, and delicious beer.

I love Vietnam. Maybe it's a pheromonic thing. Like when you meet the love of your life for the first time, and she just, somehow, inexplicably smells and feels right. You sense that given the opportunity, this is the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with. I'm in town an hour, and I'm already tipsy, delighted, giggly, and elated. In the gray afternoon, beyond the curb, pa.s.sing vignettes of beauty and color, the usual mad patterns of two-wheeled traffic miraculously weaving through crowded yet fast-moving streets. It's a gray city, Hanoi, old French Colonial architecture, grim socialist monoliths, ornate paG.o.das, the ultra-narrow multistory and at times wackily ornate new homes of the new not-so-underground economy. The infamous crachin of February, a constant spitting mist, has not officially begun, but it is chilly and drizzling ever so slightly. "Good luck for Tet," Linh a.s.sures me. The rain and the monochrome of the old city seem only to highlight the supersaturated colors of the flags, banners, clothes, and packages everywhere.

Tomorrow, I'm to be the guest of Linh and family at their New Year's celebration, but today, I'm anxious to get out there and eat. The show I'm in town to shoot is all about Linh, his family food, his local haunts, his favorite places. So after dropping off my luggage at the Metropole, I soon find myself sitting in Hanoi's Old Quarter, hungrily slurping down a bowl of bun cha.

"I eat here every day," says Linh with pride. "Sometimes twice a day."

An old man grills morsels of pork and pork meatb.a.l.l.s over a small, homemade charcoal grill (the cha) on the sidewalk, turning the meat with bamboo splints, small plumes of smoke issuing from the glowing coals as juice from the meat strikes them. Just inside an open-to-the-street storefront, his wife ladles out bowls of a room-temperature mixture of vinegar, nuoc mam, green papaya juice, sugar, pepper, garlic, and chili, with sliced cuc.u.mber at the bottom. The still-sizzling meat hits the table with a bowl of the "soup," accompanied by a plate of lettuces, sweet basil, mint, cilantro, and raw vegetables; side plates of sliced red chilies, salt, pepper, and lime; and a big plate of cold rice noodles. First you drop some pork into the soup, the meat issuing a thin slick of juice into the liquid; then, grabbing a bit of green and herb and a healthy ball of cold noodles, you dunk and slurp.

The place is dark and grim, the floor streaked with charco and littered with the detritus of Vietnamese post-lunch-rus' papers, cigarette b.u.t.ts, empty beer bottles. (Vietnamese litter with abandon, but then clean up scrupulously afterward.) The cooking equipment is rudimentary, the chopsticks look decades old, but the bun cha is an amazement: sweet, sour, meaty, crunchy, forceful yet clean-tasting and fresh, with just the right amount of caramelization and flavor from the low-temperature grilling. The cold rice noodles separate perfectly when dipped in the liquid, as they should in any good bun cha, I'm told. The proprietor puts down two more plates, fried spring rolls and puffy fried shrimp cakes, also good to dip when the pork runs out.

I begin to understand Linh's pa.s.sion for the place and why, on his lunch hour, he travels across town to eat here.

By Hanoi's West Lake, families pull up on their scooters am crowd into the temple of Chau Quoc on a spit of land extending out into the water. They are here to make offerings to their G.o.ds and ancestors, burn incense, reflect, and hope for good luck, good health, and prosperity for the coming year. I'm here to eat bun oc, and I've got my eye on a long, low table under a tarpaulin by the water's edge, where an old woman is carefully arranging two kinds of freshwater snails, crabmeat, noodles, and tomatoes in bowls before covering them with steaming hot pork broth. The smell coming off the simmering broth is maddeningly good, and she's doing land-office business with the crowd returning from the paG.o.da, so even though this is an unscheduled stop, I quickly duck under the tarp, walk bent over at the waist to the table, and scrunch down and try to find someplace for my knees among a large extended family of Vietnamese. Linh, a fellow foodie, just smiles and shakes his head. I catch the old woman's eye, point to the person next to me, already happily slurping down the last of his noodles, and smile. She beams back at me.

When a proprietor or a server smiles proudly at you like that, when locals are clamoring to get at what they're selling, when your fellow diners' expressions mirror your own, you know that good food is on the way. They do fast food right here. The glorious tradition of "one cook, one dish" continues: one lone artisan, or a family of artisans, making the same wonderful disha"and no othera"year after year, frequently generation after generation. That kind of close identification with a particular disha"that continuitya"is nearly always a guarantee that one can expect something fresh and tasty.

Case in point: A few days later, Linh pulls the car over unexpectedly on the side of a major artery. We head down an embankment to a shabby, litter-strewn neighborhood and proceed down a forlorn-looking alleyway to the smoky back entrance of Luon Nong Ong Tre, the Eel Shop. An open kitchen is heaped with dirty dishes. Two big pots steam on an outdoor charcoal grill. A few hard-drinking Vietnamese men are way over their limit inside, singing and shouting. On worn, brown bamboo matting outside, facing an unpaved intersection of narrow alleyways and disused heavy machinery, are a few low plastic chairs, a ratty umbrella or two, a few wobbly wooden tables. Neighborhood kids, squealing with delight, pick unripe oranges off an anemic-looking tree and hurl them at each other. Linh is rubbing his hands with antic.i.p.ation.

"What do you eat here?" I inquire.

"Eel," he replies. "This is the Eel Shop. Only eel."

"How did you find this place?" I ask.

"A friend took me here. He knows I like eela"and he heard about it from a friend."

I explain to Linh what the word "foodie" means and he seems very pleased. "Yes," he agrees. "Often, you must go off the road. You must investigate."

As we wait for the food, we watch the comings and goings of the neighborhood, a small, rural village existing in the midst of a major city. A trash collector (a woman, naturally), in peaked round hat, face mask, and gloves, picks up trash bags and piles them onto an overloaded handcart. Bicycles containing improbably balanced display racks of housewares are pedaled slowly In the kitchen, live eels are quickly divested of their bom by. Women carry yokes of fresh vegetables and fruit, men sell lottery tickets, a man pulls up on a motorbike to collect spent cooking oil from the eel shop, another takes away edible waste for sale to pig farmers. Aluminum cans are whisked away to makeshift recycling operations, where they are heated in works and stamped on by sandaled feet. The impurities are sold for paint, the metal, of course, reshaped, reformed, reused. Apparently, a number of viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese) and thepartners are becoming rather wealthy on the unofficial recyclin, of trash and garbage, prompting, it is said, one Central Committee member to muse chidingly, "Wea"all of usa"always ask only the big questions. It took just one foreigner to ask a small question: 'Where does the garbage go?'"

sauced lightly, and stuffed into lengths of hollow bamboo with garlic. Both ends are plugged with blanched morning glory leaves and the bamboo is charred slowly over the outdoor charcoal grill. The bamboo is then split open lengthwise and served. Ever had unagi, the cooked, glazed freshwater eel, at sushi bars? This is better. Tender, flavorful, smoky, sweet, and hearty. We picked the delicate chunks right out of the blackened halves of bamboo, washing it down, of course, with plenty of warm Hanoi beer.

A few days later, I'm back in the Old Quarter. I have to duck my head to get through the low concrete pa.s.sageway to the home and kitchen of Madame Anh Tuyet and family. Up a steep flight of steps, off with the shoes, and I'm ushered into a typical old Hanoi residence: a living area facing the street, with a small balcony, dining table, vanity mirror in the corner, raised platform in front of the family shrine, which is crowded with photographs of departed loved ones, offerings of flowers, fruit, figurines. Overhead, a sleeping loft, and upstairs, a large, covered but open-to-the-street kitchen where Madame Tuyet and daughters prepare her famous ca qua quon thit, snakehead fish stuffed with pork, and ga nuong mat ong, a honey-roasted, hacked chicken that has local patrons lining up and down the street when she's open. Madame Tuyet has won numerous gold medals in countrywide culinary compet.i.tions, and she proudly shows me her certificates before hurrying to her upstairs kitchen. She fillets the snakehead fish, deep-fries the carca.s.s and head for garnish in a wok full of simmering oil, then sets it aside. She slices the fillets paper thin on the bias, fills them with a ground pork and mushroom mixture as for paupiettes, then dips them in batter and deep-fries them before arranging around the now leaping, curved fish bodya"as if rea.s.sembling the creature. Her chicken, which she has b.u.t.terflied up the breast bone and splayed flat, she slowly roasts in one of a row of small, carbon- and grease-blackened old electric ovens, removing them constantly to sh.e.l.lac with a secret honey-sugar-syrup mixture and covering them periodically with bits of lined white index cards strategically placed to prevent scorching. A daughter effortlessly fills spring rolls with shrimp and pork; fills condiment bowls with chili sauce, nuoc mam, vinegar and green papaya, salt, pepper, lime, and chilies. Suddenly there's stir-fried shrimp and vegetables, and spicy beef too, and I'm seated with Linh and the whole family at the dinner table. It being Tet, a chung cake is placed center table. No one touches it. Apparently, the chung cake is the fruitcake or panettone of Vietnam: gotta have ita"but no one really eats it.

We all know by now that Vietnamese food can be great. And I could describe that sensational meal at Madame Tuyet's using all the words you hear so often from travelers returning from Vietnam: fresh, flavorful, vibrant, crunchy, supernaturally bright looking and tasting. But I won't.

Vietnamese food can be great in Texas, or Minneapolis. But Vietnamese food in Vietnam, when outside the window it's Hanoia"a slice of an apartment building with faded, peeling facade just visible across the street; women hanging out laundry; the chatter of noodle and fruit vendors coming from one flight down; the high, throaty vibrations of countless motorbikes; Madame's two daughters giggling upstairs, perhaps laughing about the freakishly tall, unbelievably hungry American who sits 2.01.

downstairs, ineptly struggling to eat Mom's still-bone-in chicken with chopsticksa"at such times, Vietnamese food tastes even better.

Linh is happy. We're getting into shots of nep moi now, the vicious, delicious Hanoi rice vodka, and everybody at the table is in a festive holiday mood. Chris and Lydia finally put down their cameras and join us hungrily at the table. When we are finished with this, there will be tea, and Madame's award-winning blend of fresh roasted coffee, and 555 cigarettes, and Madame's lighter-than-air, crunchy coconut macaroons.

Tonight, as the camera crew and I sit in comfortable rattan chairs at the Bamboo Bar of the drenched-in-history Metropole Hotel, drinking vermouth ca.s.sis and reviewing the day's events, we will all smile, and nod silently to one anothera"maybe uttering an occasional "Oh yeah!" to commemorate the day's events. We know we've got it good. We're happy to be alive. And still in Vietnam.

zoz DECODINGFERRAN ADRIA.

EVERYBODY WANTS IT.

"It's the most magnificent book you can finda"anywhere in the world," says Eric Ripert, chef of Le Bernardin in Manhattan. He's talking about Spanish chef Ferran Adria's mammoth cookbook El Bulli 1998-2002, the first of three volumes that will track backward the development of recipes and procedures at the famed Spanish three-star restaurant. Currently available only in Spanish and Catalan, costing about one hundred seventy-five euros and weighing in at nearly ten pounds (with its accompanying guidebook and CD-ROM), it seems more the mysterious black monolith in 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey than a cookbook. It is also the most talked-about, sought-after, wildly impressive and intimidating collectible in the world of professional chefs and cookbook wonks. If you're a hotshot chef, even if you can't read it, every minute without it is misery.

Science-fiction and s.p.a.ce-travel metaphors come up frequently when discussing it. "There's no cookbook like it. I love the fact that it's like Star Wars," says Wylie Dufresne, an unabashed fan of Adria whose WD-50 menu in New York was unapologetically created under the controversial Catalonian chef's influence. "He's going backward^" (The next book will cover the years 1994 to 1997.) "We're all looking at Spain. And Adria's ground zero."

For years now, I'd been hearing from chef friends about their experiences at El Bulli. Some, like Sydney's Tetsuya Wakuda, had clearly had life-changing experiences. (He immediately s about designing an upstairs "laboratory/workshop" along t' lines of Adria's.) Others, like Scott Bryan of Veritas, wer dazzled but confused by the experience.

"It was . . . like . . . shock value. I had seawater sorbetV Y been gaping with a mixture of fear and longing at The Book fo some months when I finally decided I was way past due. The was a ma.s.sive, shameful, and gaping hole in my culina education. There were things I needed to know. It was tin to investigate the matter.

Ferran Adria sat at a small table in the closet-size back roo of Jamonisimo, an Iberico ham shop in Barcelona. He was nearl vibrating with enthusiasm as he held a thin slice of Salamanc ham in his hands and rubbed it slowly on his lips. At exactl blood temperature, the wide layer of white fat around the lea turned translucent, then melted to liquid. "See! See!" he e claimed. We had already polished off a bottle of Cava, sever gla.s.ses of sherry, a plate of tiny, unbelievably good tinne Galician clams, some b.u.t.tery also-straight-from-the-can toro-quality tuna from Basque country, some anchoviesa"and numerous tastings of hand-cut Extremadura and Salamanca ham. The man generally thought of as the most innovative aninfluential chef in the world was not turning out to be th detached, clinical, mad scientist I'd expected. This guy like food. He liked to eat. And he neatly linked the "scientific approach of some of his cooking to simple pleasure: "What' wrong with science?" he asked. "What's wrong with transform ing food?" He held up another slice of ham between his finger" "The making of ham is a 'process.' You 'transform' pork. Iberic ham is better than pork. Good sherry is better than the grapes it' made with."

At El Bulli Taller, Adria's laboratory/workshop in a restore Gothic palace in Barcelona's old quarter, metal shutters rolled up to the touch of a b.u.t.ton to reveal a panoply of gadgets an utensils. A worktable slid back to uncover an induction stov top. Cabinets opened, displaying an impressive hyperorganize array of backlit ingredients, each in identical, clear gla.s.s jars. The place looked more like Dr. No's sanctum sanctorum than a kitchen. But the subject here was always food.

"What is 'better?'" asked Adria, holding up a small, lovely looking pear. "A pear? Or a white truffle? Is a white truffle 'better' because it's more expensive? Because it's rare?" He doesn't know, he said. But he wanted to find out. The taller, or studio, is a place where questions are constantly asked, about the physical properties of food ("Can we do this? Can we do that? Can we make a caramel that doesn't break down in humid conditions? Can we make a cappuccino froth that tastes of the essence of carrot? Can we make a hot jellied consomme?"), about dining, about the fundamental nature of cuisine and gastronomy. For six months out of every year, Adria closes his restaurant, and along with his brother Alberto, chemist Pere Castells, industrial designer Luki Huber, and his chef, Oriol Castro, he works here, experimenting, scrupulously doc.u.menting everything, and asking questionsa"some of which are clearly threatening, even heretical to the status quo.

What is a meal?

What is dinner?

What is a chef?

One can't help but ask oneself these things, even as Adria and crew turn their attention to smaller, less metaphysical questions. On this day, as I watched, they were asking if a thick slab of ripe peach could be caramelized to mimic the appearance and consistency of pan-seared foie gras. (Apparently yes.) Can a beautiful fresh anchovy be cooked, yet still appear raw, leaving the attractive outer skin as untouched-looking as it appears in nature? (Seems like it.) Can one make "caviar" from fresh mango puree? (Again, yes.) Of five or six experimentsa"each conducted in various waysa"during the course of the day, generally positive results were recorded in the accompanying charts and notebooks.

"If I can come up with two or three important ideas a year, that's a very good year," said Adria. Many of you have no doubt seen the ripple effects of some earlier successfully executed ideas on menus near you: foam (which he no longer does), hot jellied consomme, pasta made of squid, jellied cheese, frozen foie gras "powder." Say what you will about Adria. Many of the sa chefs who've been sneering at the very idea of him now sham lessly crib his ideas, peeling off the more applicable concepts use in their more conventional menus.

They may ask questions at the taller, but a high-risk, high-wire act like El Bulli demands questions of its diners as well. Big questions. Is it food? Or is it novelty? And is it "good"a"in the traditional sense of that word (whatever that might be)? At El Bulli, the constantly evolving thirty-course meal seems to gleefully invite furious debate.

The restaurant sits by a remote Mediterranean beach, about seven miles of twisting, clifftop road outside of the town of Roses on Spain's Costa Brava. Invited to join Adria for dinner in the El Bulli kitchen, I sat down and ate what was by turns a shattering, wondrous, confusing, delightful, strangely comforting, constantly surprising, and always marvelous meal.

About thirty different plates appeared in the course of the four-hour experience. The kitchen itself defies convention: cool, quiet, elegant, and modern, with large picture windows and works of sculpture placed throughout. A crew of thirty-five to fifty-five cooks serve one seating per night to an equal number of customers. It is a serious, relatively serene environment, light years away from the fiery mosh pits and sweaty submarinelike s.p.a.ces most cooks are familiar with.

Voices are seldom raised. There are no shouts or curses, no clatter of pots, no oven doors being kicked closed. The chef and I ate at a plain, white-covered table devoid of elaborate setups or floral arrangement. Whether it was more "experience" or "dinner" I will probably spend the rest of my life figuring out. The evening was a long gastro-thrill ride ranging from the farthest reaches of chemistry cla.s.s (a single raw egg yolk sh.e.l.lacked in caramel and encased in gold leaf) to the stunningly simple (two pristine, fresh prawns cooked in their own saucea"no other ingredient). Mr. Adria, who insists he can tell everything important about people by watching them eat, set the pace, eating every course along with me (and in some cases ahead of me), explaining which striking-looking objects to eat first, which second, and how. "Eat in one bite! Quickly!" Pace and rhythm are important, he insisted. "One musn't eat too slowly or one gets sluggish and tired."

"Snacks" arrived first. A green "pine frappe c.o.c.ktail," artichoke chips, an austere black plate with toasts, sea salt, finely chopped peanuts, and a white toothpaste tube of homemade peanut b.u.t.ter hit the table at the same time as "raspberry lily pads," hazelnut in "textures," lemon tempura with licorice, rhubarb with black pepper, a terrifically tasty row of salty sea cuc.u.mber "cracklings" arranged on a tiny black rack, and large puffs of pork scratchings with a yogurt dipping sauce.

"Jamon de toro" arived next. A pun on the word toro (bull), it was in fact fatty tuna belly cured like Iberico ham, served with silver pincers to pick up the ethereally thin slices without bunching or tearing them. The pincers looked (intentionally) like a surgical implement.

Adria watched me eat each course as it appeared, his face lighting up again and again as my expression registered surprise. "Cherries with ham" looked like fondant-covered cherries but were in fact cherries glazed entirely in ham fat. The "golden egg," a tiny golden pillow of egg yolk wrapped in caramel and gold leaf, confronted the palate with flavors in distinct sequence: shock, disorientation, then comforting rea.s.surance. A tiny "Parmesan ice cream sandwich" was an extreme example of a play on comfort food: a salty-sweet remembrance of a childhood that never happened, one of many throughly delicious practical jokes. Apple "caviar"a"tiny globules of unearthly apple essencea"were served in a faux Petrossian tin. Two crepe courses, one made with chicken skin and the next made, improbably, entirely of milk (!), were a pleasure to eat. Pea "ravioli" was a seemingly impossible concoction in which the bright green, liquidy essence of baby peas was wrapped only in itself with no pasta or outer sh.e.l.l to contain it: a ravioli filling miraculously suspended in s.p.a.ce. Carrot "air" was an intensely flavored, truly lighter-than-air froth of carrot and tangerine served in a cut-gla.s.s bowl. I accidentally inhaled while bringing the spoon to my moutha"aspirating some into my lungsa"and struggled to maintain composure as I coughed and turned red. The inconceivable-sounding iced powder of foie gras with foie gras consomme was one of those revelatory concepts for which Adria is famous. A hot, perfectly clear consomme of foie shared a bowl with a just-fallen snow of foie gras "powder." Instructed to eat from one side of the dish then the other, alternating between hot and cold, I was awestruck by the fact that the frozen, finely ground powder somehow maintained its structural integrity in a bowl of hot broth. It defied all known physical properties of the universe. And it was as good as anything cooked anywherea"a direct rebuke to centuries of cla.s.sical cooking, miles out in front of all the "foie gras cappuccinos" and stacks of "pan-seared foie gras with chutney and microgreens" one sees everywhere these days. I thought it the strongest, best argument for what Adria says he's trying to do. "Every night is like opening night," he says. "It has to be . . . magic."

"Oysters with oysters and yogurt, rolled with macadamia nut" was another astonishing success. Two perfect oysters, in an essence of liquefied smaller oysters, a dot of lemon relish, and then a macadamia yogurt cream, when eaten precisely in sequence, took the tongue on a wild yet strangely familiar ride around the worlda"and then right back to my very first oyster. A shimmering, translucent globe of raw tuna marrow topped with a few beads of caviar was so good that Adria says, "I won't serve it to my j.a.panese customers. If the j.a.panese find out about this the price for tuna bones will go up!" He had a point. The ultralight, unearthly substance tasted like top-quality Edo-style sushia"from another planet. Like nearly everything I tried that night, it had a carefully calibrated progression of clean, precise flavors and a pleasurable aftertaste that didn't intrude on the course to follow.

Cuttlefish and coconut "ravioli" was two tight pillows of cuttlefish that exploded unexpectedly (and disturbingly) in the mouth, flooding it with liquid. When I recovered from the surprise, I looked up to see Adria laughing delightedly. Summer truffle "cannelloni" with veal bone marrow and rabbit brains was rich, over the top, sumptuous and b.u.t.tery flavored, and the most traditional "entree" of many.

"Two meters of Parmesan cheese spaghetti" was one six-foot-long strand of cheese-flavored consomme suspended with agar-agar. Coiled in a bowl like a small portion of spaghetti carbonara, with a dot of black pepper, it is to be slurped into the mouth (Mr. Adria demonstrated noisily) in one long sucking movement. A single rack of fried anchovy racka"just crispy head and bonesa" arrived in a funereal cloud of cotton-candy-looking substance and once again tasted wonderful despite its scary appearance.

The unconventional, even horrifying-looking, "chocolate soil," which resembled a bowl full of playground dirt and pebbles, was in fact a conventional tasting chocolate and hazelnut dessert. A "morphing" course of "English bread"a"a loaf with the appearance of Wonder Bread that virtually disappeared once placed on the tonguea"leaving no trace of ever having been there was followed by a freebie take-home "surprise." A bag with what seemed to be a baguette protruding from it was placed in front of me. Mr. Adria suddenly reached across the table and brought a fist down on it. It shattered into brittle shards of fennel-scented pastry.

Was dinner good? I don't know if that's a word one can use when describing the El Bulli experience. It can be more comfortably described as "great"a"meaning hugely enjoyable, challenging to the world order, innovative, revolutionary. It was an uncomfortably revelatory experience for an old-school cook like me who had always thought food was about terroir and tradition, the familiar ways in which chefs have always sought to please their customers. Everything about the meal was clear evidence that the world has changed in bold, new, and uncontrollable ways.