A Cook's Tour Part 7

Everyone knows each other in Cambodia, it seems. We were on the other side of the country in the middle of nowhere and Kry and the two motorheads were acting as if they b.u.mped into one another like this all the time.

'You see Misha?' asked Tim.

'We saw him just now, coming in, talking to some KR guys,' said Andy.

'He was on the plane with us to Siemreap,' I offered.

'How'd he get here from Battambang?' asked Tim. 'We didn't pa.s.s him on the road.'

'Maybe he take helicopter,' said Kry.

'Ahhh . . . yesss,' said Tim with an evil cackle.

The two men were on a road trip across Cambodia's back roads a daunting obstacle course for most travelers, but rollicking good fun for dirt bikes. They'd intended to travel from Pailin down to Sihanoukville and the sea but ran into trouble after encountering an illegal logging camp in the jungle and had had to turn back.

'We're going to try another route,' said Tim, 'but if things don't work out, we'll see you in Battambang maybe.'

We couldn't get out of town fast enough, but our driver misunderstood Kry's instructions and headed toward the Thai border, grumbling under his breath. It was an hour before we figured out that we were headed in the wrong direction, inching along miles of jungle road, pa.s.sing small farmhouses with satellite dishes on the roofs, the telltale black Toyota Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, and SUVs sitting outside of neat homes in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere were felled trees as if an army of indiscriminate lumberjacks had simply waded through, chopping down everything in sight. The clouds hung low around the mountaintops, and the people, when they saw our car and our cameras, appeared shocked, as if we'd disturbed them while bathing. Our driver looked frantically unhappy. When Kry finally pointed out that we wanted to go in the opposite direction back to Battambang the driver nearly wept with relief.

The whole way to Pailin, our driver had kept his vehicle at a steady ten miles per hour. On the way back, he tore along at a reckless thirty miles per hour, oblivious to any damage he might be doing to his suspension or undercarriage. He's scared, I realized. Really scared. When we pa.s.sed a company of black-clad militia in full parade formation a few yards from the road, their heads turning in unison to watch us, our driver sped up even more, glancing nervously in the rearview mirror for the next twenty miles. At a checkpoint we'd pa.s.sed the day before, there had been one or two rifles clapped-out M1s or Chinese knockoffs. Now, the same checkpoint bristled with AK-47s. The whole way back, our driver was spooked. Every innocuous-looking civilian we pa.s.sed on the road seemed to fill the guy with terror, a potential lookout radioing ahead to the ambush party. I never thought I'd be happy to see the Hotel TEO again, but I was. When you've been to Pailin, Battambang seems like a megalopolis.

Midnight in Battambang.

Tim drove one motorcycle, with me on the back, hanging on for dear life. Andy drove the other, with Misha behind him. We raced through Battambang's quiet streets at high speed, making a G.o.d-awful noise, roaring over a narrow pedestrian bridge toward the far end of town to a strip of bars and brothels. Generally, when you're a Westerner encountering a roadblock, you try to bull your way through. Fully aware of your privileged position as a white man with money in his pocket, you slow down, just enough to be polite, maybe smile a little, then try to breeze through as if roadblocks and checkpoints and armed police or military can't possibly be intended for the likes of you. And this usually works, I was told. It was certainly what Tim and Andy expected when we came upon a floodlit square, a line of uniformed policemen stopping traffic. We slowed down a little but, in typical expat style, did not stop.

Suddenly, things got very dicey.

'Stop! You stop now! You stop now!' screamed a uniformed cop with more confetti on his chest than the others in firing position around him. It's unusual in an Asian country to see someone visibly angry. It's just not done. When one loses one's cool and one's control, starts screaming and yelling and making faces, one is usually considered to have lost the argument. Hence the term losing face losing face. The rule did not apply here. The cop doing the screaming was absolutely livid, his voice cracking as he shrieked in English and Khmer for us to stop and get off our bikes. His face was contorted with rage, muscles twitching beneath his skin like a nest of rattlesnakes in a thin cotton sack. There was the sound of klick, klack, klick, kachunk klick, klack, klick, kachunk as six policemen flicked off their safeties and racked rounds into their weapons. as six policemen flicked off their safeties and racked rounds into their weapons.

'Oh s.h.i.+t,' said Misha, who'd been shot already at one of these impromptu affairs.

'f.o.o.kin' 'ell,' said Tim, stopping and turning off his engine. Andy did the same.

'You stop! You get off now! You get off now!' screamed the lead cop, the others yelling along now in Khmer, their weapons fully extended. I dismounted first and immediately got a gun barrel thrust in my face, five or six people screaming at once. Another rifle prodded me to turn around, the little cop indicating he wanted me to put my hands on my head. Misha got off the back of Andy's bike and, familiar with the drill, calmly placed his hands on his head, too. Andy and Tim were last, as it takes a minute to put down kickstands. All the while the screaming and the threatening continued, the gun barrels becoming more intrusive, no longer a prod, but a shove. When all of us were standing there in the middle of the street, our hands clasped on top of our heads, bikes silent, the little cop demanded to know if we had any guns. This seemed to please Misha, who translated.

'Where you go?' demanded the little cop, his face still red and twitching.

'We're going to the brothels,' said Tim in English, following that up with a few words in Khmer and that evil laugh again.

As if by magic, the cop's face relaxed, the picture of instant serenity and congeniality. Smiles all around. Like the maitre d' of an expensive restaurant, the little cop, who only seconds before had looked like he would most certainly be shooting us dead any moment or at the very least dragging us off to jail stepped back and to the side, arm extended in welcome, and ushered us theatrically through.

Fire Over England

England's burning.

Turn on the telly, open up a newspaper, and you'll see or hear about smoldering mounds of stiffened livestock, quarantines, checkpoints, disinfectant, and body counts. No one seems to know when the killing will stop maybe, it sometimes seems, when every edible creature in the UK has been executed, burned, and bulldozed into a pit. Just when diners were learning to live with the remote possibility that the beef they're eating could riddle their brains with spongiform bacteria, turn their cerebral cortices into loofahs, the foot-and-mouth thing (which does not affect humans) comes along, causing fear and uncertainty among the populace and giving yet more comfort and succor to the forces of darkness and evil.

The battle lines are drawn. Good and evil have met and the front line is England. Nowhere else can the threat be so clearly defined. Nowhere else are good guys and bad guys so visible and apparent, the choices so black and white, devoid of gray.

I love England. I'm there a lot. So I have a vested interest in the outcome. Few cultures are as resolutely grounded in the appreciation of a nice thick slab of fatty meat, a well-brewed beer or ale than the English.

No country was experiencing the kind of foodie gold rush, that boomtown ma.s.s psychosis that suddenly causes everyone to become obsessed with all things to do with food, restaurants, chefs, and cuisine, that England was (except maybe Australia). Things were going so well. Now? Everything hangs in the balance. It's war. A fight for the hearts, minds, and souls of future generations. If the dark forces win? They'll be looking across the Atlantic; don't doubt that for a second. They already have their operatives in place. They'll be looking at your plate, inspecting your refrigerator. They already are. They want to take your meat away.

They even want your cheese.

j.a.panese p.o.r.n is ugly, violent, and disturbing. German p.o.r.n is ugly, fetis.h.i.+stic, and disturbing. American p.o.r.n is stupid, slick, and produced in multiple versions (how explicit depends on what major hotel chain you're staying at) s.e.x as a ma.s.s-produced corporate endeavor. Brit p.o.r.n, however, is the absolute bottom of the barrel stuff so witless, brainless, joyless, and strange as to remove from the imagination immediately any possibility that s.e.x might ever actually be fun.

The actors are crude, fat, and saggy and have bad teeth and dirty feet. Even their tattoos are artless. The cast members, apparently, are compelled to have s.e.x through their underwear, tonguing saliva-soaked Jockey shorts until the questions about why Brits have historically been so f.u.c.ked up about s.e.x are answered: Judging from the videos I saw, it's all about b.u.m whacking and undies. There is no hope. Bear with me here; I'm leading up to an allegory.

Eventually.

One can be forgiven, I hope on first look for thinking that the only people getting laid in England are rock stars and chefs. (Which is entirely appropriate. The two professions have traditionally been at the vanguard of s.e.xual adventurism.) In England, as in America and Australia, the population has gone chef-crazy, reading about them in the tabloids, watching them on TV, buying their recipe books, losing themselves in lurid fantasies of cutting-board penetration and sweaty tangles in the larder. If food is the new p.o.r.n a less dangerous alternative to the anonymous and unprotected s.h.a.g of decades past then the mission is even more urgent.

A sampler of England's hottest 'chefs' would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates.' He's a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I've never seen him naked. I believe the 'Naked' refers to his 'simple, straightforward, unadorned' food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.

Another TV demiG.o.d is Nigella Lawson the object of desire of nearly every male I met in England and the apparent dream of perfection for most women I encountered. She's a wealthy and beautiful widow who cooks in a denim jacket. When she leans over the workbench, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are the focus of intent contemplation and rhapsodic praise by the male television audience.

Last time I was in England, it was all anyone seemed to want to talk about: 'Nigella's b.r.e.a.s.t.s . . . have you seen them?' While she may not look like too many cooks I know, she does seem to cook a lot of exuberantly cheesy, fatty, greasy stuff not shying away from the b.u.t.ter and cream which puts her on the side of the angels in my book. How many upper-crust widows do you know who say, 'f.u.c.k it! Let's eat what's good!' Not many. I like her.

There's the Martha Stewart-like Delia Smith. There's the gel-headed Gary Rhodes. And then there's Ainsley Harriott a man who makes Emeril look like William Buckley. Harriott, who tried his act in New York for a while, specializes in eye rolling, cooing, squealing, flattering, and mugging. It makes me cringe to watch a grown black man doing shtick, capering and coddling an audience of bison-sized white women who, were Harriott not on TV, would probably call the cops if he wandered into their neighborhoods.

The big dogs in England, the good guys, the people actually cooking in restaurants (which is what chefs are supposed to do, isn't it?), the folks actually fighting the good fight are what's really interesting about the English food scene. Swaggering, eccentric, aggressive, compet.i.tive, often brilliant, they're a refres.h.i.+ng change from their US counterparts in the celebrity chef racket.

In our country, when a blue-collar goof scores any kind of commercial success, he immediately strives to stop dropping his g g's, to begin enunciating consonants, to stop using the word f.u.c.k f.u.c.k as a comma. He may, as in the case of one much-praised colleague, immediately hire the services of a personal hairstylist and voice coach. In the UK, it's different. There, once a measure of success has been attained, the chef feels free to become the badly behaved, borderline-violent hooligan he always wanted to be, freely displaying the inner rude boy. Which is one of the reasons I feel very much at home in London. as a comma. He may, as in the case of one much-praised colleague, immediately hire the services of a personal hairstylist and voice coach. In the UK, it's different. There, once a measure of success has been attained, the chef feels free to become the badly behaved, borderline-violent hooligan he always wanted to be, freely displaying the inner rude boy. Which is one of the reasons I feel very much at home in London.

It's compet.i.tive over there. When I casually mentioned to an English pal that I had lent a case of mesclun to the chef at the restaurant across the street from me in New York, he was outraged.

'What? b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! We'd never do that here.' b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! We'd never do that here.'

What happens if he runs out of mesclun? Would he borrow?

'Wouldn't give the b.a.s.t.a.r.d the satisfaction.'

Camaraderie is somewhat rarer. To a.s.sociate too freely with other chefs is to trade with the enemy. When a sous-chef leaves a position to start his own operation, it's like he defected. He becomes the Person Never to Be Mentioned Again. In New York, if the chef across the street steals your saucier, you don't harbor too much of a grudge. Everybody knows you'll be stealing his grillardin if you get the chance. And everybody involved is probably going to end up working together some day anyway so get over it. Stealing of cooks and recipes is part of the game even part of the fun for some of us. In England, feuding with food critics, commentators, and other chefs is encouraged and may even be a good career move. In New York, the idea of throwing the New York Times New York Times food critic (if you are lucky enough to recognize him) rudely out into the street with his guests would seem suicidally foolish. In England it's good public relations. food critic (if you are lucky enough to recognize him) rudely out into the street with his guests would seem suicidally foolish. In England it's good public relations.

I threw a late-night party awhile back at a place in London's meat district to launch my book. I invited a lot of chefs, a good number of the press, and booksellers. The hope was that the chefs would swing by after work and have some fun. They did.

A terrifying mob of blood- and sauce-spattered culinarians lurched in the doors, many still reeking of sweat and fish, made straight for the bar, and began baiting and bullying the vastly outnumbered civilians. On at least two occasions, I had to step in between some white-clad chef and about-to-be-a.s.s-whupped journo or bookstore manager to avert senseless butchery. As the chefs' numbers swelled to a mob of alcohol-swilling madmen, their accents growing thicker and their tone more belligerent, the representatives of the press appeared to contract slowly into a defensive perimeter by the bathrooms. A good time was had by all.

On to the good guys.

'This was a happy pig,' says Fergus Henderson, looking down with pleasure at the head of a carefully roasted medium-sized pig. He emphasizes his pride and respect for what he knows is d.a.m.ned delicious (perfectly crispy skin, b.u.t.tery sweet nearly ethereal fat, tender, ropy cheeks) by moving his arms up and down robotically. Behind clear gla.s.s lenses, his face is a little flushed, the corner of his mouth a little stiff, and one leg is pretty much checking out for the day he's dragging it the last hour. Fergus represents England's best hope for salvation, the man at the spear point, a warrior, pioneer, philosopher, and fearless proponent of what's good and has always been good about English cooking; he knows about the pure enjoyment of high-quality pork and pork products.

Hours ago, we returned from Smithfield Market, where we spent the early-morning hours looking at meat, poking at entrails, prodding carca.s.ses, and waxing poetic about animal fat. The day began in a cellar pub at 6:00 a.m., the chef and I enjoying a hearty breakfast of Guinness and deviled kidneys, the room filled with meat cutters in white plastic helmets and long white lab coats. Now, standing over my table, Fergus is tired. He's been up since G.o.d knows when, was at his restaurant for lunch service, and is now presiding over an elaborate procession of nearly everything on the menu for my dinner. There are surely better chefs in England, but Fergus is my favorite he's a hero to me, one righteous, solitary soul-surfing, daredevil motherf.u.c.ker. I hesitate to mention that he's struggling with Parkinson's disease, because he was already a t.i.tan in my eyes, long before I knew. If there's one real hero chef in this book, a man who deliberately put himself outside the pack, staked out a position, and then held it against all comers it's Fergus Henderson, chef of what is maybe my favorite restaurant in the world: St. John, in the Smithfield area of London. Never has his country needed him more.

Years ago, when the prevailing wisdom among foodies dictated quaint, tiny, sculpted portions of brightly colored odd bits light on the protein and heavy on the veg, Fergus was reveling in pig pig fat, pig parts, and pig guts his plates rustic-colored palettes of browns, beiges, and earth tones maybe the occasional flash of green simple, una.s.suming, unpretentious and absolutely and unapologetically English.

While most of his contemporaries, newly empowered by Michelin stars and a suddenly food-crazed public, rushed to the squeeze bottle and the metal ring, to j.a.panese and French cla.s.sics for inspiration, Fergus was alone on the hill, running up the Union Jack. He went to a neighborhood where n.o.body wanted to go, set up shop in an all-white abattoir-looking s.p.a.ce down a seemingly uninviting alley, and began serving what he refers to as 'nose to tail' eating, a menu so astonis.h.i.+ngly reactionary for its time, he might well in another country have been imprisoned for it. Today, while lesser mortals cower around their veggie plates in hemp sandals, cringing at the thought of contamination by animal product, St. John's devotees and there are a lot of them flock to his plain, undecorated dining room to revel in roasted marrow, rolled spleen, grilled ox heart, braised belly, and fried pig's tails.

It was a very b.a.l.l.sy position to take back in the early nineties and it's an even b.a.l.l.sier proposition today, when the Evil Axis Powers of Health n.a.z.is, Vegetarian Taliban, European Union bureacrats, antismoking crystal wors.h.i.+pers, PETA fundamentalists, fast-food theme-restaurant moguls, and their sympathizers are consolidating their fearful hold on popular dining habits and practices.

Fergus is an exception to my general observations of chef behavior as he's an exception to nearly all the rules. Standing by my table, he lovingly, even serenely, describes the lovely little pig's tail I'm about to eat and how much he's sure I'll like it.

'This was a very n.o.ble pig,' he says, looking like a thoroughly charming mad scientist in his white jacket and ap.r.o.n, his movements stiff, formal. He speaks quietly; shy, wry, sounding way too educated to be a chef, he's the last guy in the world you'd picture as the proprietor of an establishment that celebrates nothing less than guts and glory.

These are dire times to be a chef who specializes in pork and offal. The EU has its eye on unpasteurized cheese, artisa.n.a.l everything, sh.e.l.lfish, meat, anything that carries the slightest, most infinitesimal possibility of risk or the slightest potential for pleasure. There is talk of banning unaged cheese, stock bones, soft-boiled or raw eggs. In the States, legislation has been suggested, mandating a written warning when a customer requests eggs over easy or a Caesar salad. ('Warning! Fork if placed into eye may cause injury!') A woman in the States won a lawsuit, claiming her coffee was too hot, scalding her as she stomped on the accelerator exiting the McDonald's parking lot. ('Warning! Deep-fried Mars bar if stuffed down pants may cause genital scarring!') The result of this unrestrained fear mongering, this mad rush to legislate new extremes of shrink-wrapped germ-free safety? Much like it was after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle The Jungle scared the h.e.l.l out of early-twentieth-century meat eaters the absorption of small independents into giant factory farms and slaughter domes. Try and eat an American chicken and you will see what looms: bloodless, flavorless, colorless, and riddled with salmonella a by-product of letting the little guys go under and the big conglomerates run things their way. scared the h.e.l.l out of early-twentieth-century meat eaters the absorption of small independents into giant factory farms and slaughter domes. Try and eat an American chicken and you will see what looms: bloodless, flavorless, colorless, and riddled with salmonella a by-product of letting the little guys go under and the big conglomerates run things their way.

You have only to visit an English pub in, say, Bristol or Birmingham once-proud strongholds of British culinary tradition at its simplest and most unvarnished to see that the enemy has reached the gates and is pounding on the door. A vegetarian menu! Right there next to the steak and kidney pie and the bangers and mas.h.!.+ Worse far worse is when you look over at the bar and see Brits, brewers of some of the finest alcoholic beverages in the world, gorgeous beers, ales, and bitters, once served in that most n.o.ble of drinking vessels the pint gla.s.s sucking Budweisers from long-necked bottles.

It's war. On one side, a growing army of hugely talented young British, Scottish, Irish, and Australian chefs, rediscovering their own enviable indigenous resources and marrying them with either new and brash concepts or old and neglected cla.s.sics. On the other? A soul-destroying tsunami of bad, fake reproductions of what was already bad, fake New York 'Mexican' food. Gluey, horrible nachos, microwaved never-fried 'refried' beans, fabric softener margaritas. Limp, soggy, watery, and thoroughly d.i.c.kless 'enchiladas' and catsupy salsas. Clueless 'Pan-Asian' watering holes where every callow youth with a can of coconut milk and some curry powder thinks he's Ho Chi Minh. (Forget it. Ho could cook.) Sus.h.i.+ is almost nowhere to be found in spite of the fact that the seafood in the UK is magnificent. You get more heart, soul, and flavor at an East End pie shop than at any of the rotten, fake, dumbed-down 'Italian,' 'j.a.panese fusion,' or theme purgatories. Even the cod the basic ingredient of fish and chips is disappearing. (I raised that subject with a Portuguese cod importer. 'The d.a.m.ned seals eat them,' was his answer. 'Kill more seals,' he suggested.) Fortunately, Fergus and other like-minded souls are on the front lines, and they're unlikely to abandon their positions. Sitting at St. John, I ordered what I think is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth: Fergus's roasted bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, croutons, and sea salt.

Oh G.o.d, is it good. How something so simple can be so . . . so . . . absolutely luxurious. A few Flintstone-sized lengths of veal shank, a lightly dressed salad . . . Lord . . . to tunnel into those bones, smear that soft gray-pink-and-white marrow onto a slab of toasted bread, sprinkle with some sel gris sel gris . . . take a bite . . . Angels sing, celestial trumpets . . . six generations of one's ancestors smile down from heaven. It's b.u.t.ter from G.o.d. . . . take a bite . . . Angels sing, celestial trumpets . . . six generations of one's ancestors smile down from heaven. It's b.u.t.ter from G.o.d.

A few years ago, the neighborhood around St. John was about as fas.h.i.+onable as a fistula. Now, there are faces and bodies one usually a.s.sociates with tofu snacks and soy milk smoothies, skinny, well-dressed women, mussing their lipstick as they enthusiastically gnaw bones, ooh and aah over the glories of pork belly, pig's trotter, tripe all that lovingly cooked offal. It's where the people who truly love food, who know what's good about wiping grease off their chins, can congregate without fear, safe from the dark clouds of processed food gathering over Europe. A meal at St. John is only one of the great dining experiences one can have in England. I'm not going to bother to give you an overview reciting the names of all the sharp, ambitious, well-trained chefs who have, in recent years, completely reversed the widely held perception that English food was c.r.a.p. Suffice it to say that most of these guys could kick their French counterparts' a.s.ses around the block. An Englishman in the kitchen be it in New York, Melbourne, or anywhere else is a promise of good things to come. A meal at St. John is not just one of the great eating experiences on the planet it's a call to the barricades.

Because it will not end with the marrow (which already has to be imported from Holland). The enemy wants your cheese. They want you never again to risk the possibility of pleasure with a reeking, unpasteurized Stilton, an artisa.n.a.l wine, an oyster on the half sh.e.l.l. They have designs on stock. Stock! Stock! (Bones, you know can't have that.) The backbone of (Bones, you know can't have that.) The backbone of everything everything good! They want your sausage. And your b.a.l.l.s, too. In short, they want you to feel that same level of discomfort approaching a plate of food that so many used to feel about s.e.x. good! They want your sausage. And your b.a.l.l.s, too. In short, they want you to feel that same level of discomfort approaching a plate of food that so many used to feel about s.e.x.

Do I overstate the case? Go to Wisconsin. Spend an hour in an airport or a food court in the Midwest; watch the pale, doughy ma.s.ses of pasty-faced, Pringle-fattened, morbidly obese teenagers. Then tell me I'm worried about nothing. These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn't really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and m.u.f.fins, b.u.t.terless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

I've never eaten Marco Pierre White's food, though I've lingered longingly over his cookbooks. He, I believe, no longer cooks personally at his restaurants and is no longer the haunted-looking bad boy of the British culinary scene. Nowadays, he looks more like a well-fed Venetian merchant prince. But back in the old days, he was a hugely important figure in the UK culinary firmament and a crucial trunk in the genealogy of next-generation chefs. He remains a hero to me for two reasons. First, his food was important defiantly retro (with his pig trotters, for instance), unapologetically French (he took them on at their own game and won). His food was (and is) creative, beautiful to look at, and, I am reliably informed, delicious in every way. Second, he threw customers he didn't like out of his dining rooms a move that caused shudders of pleasure among chefs around the world. And third and most important to me his was the first cookbook where the chef looked like the chefs I knew gaunt, driven, unkempt. That groundbreaking photograph of Marco smoking a cigarette in White Heat White Heat made so many of us everywhere say, 'I am not alone! There are others like me!' (I'm not saying, by the way, that I can cook anywhere near as well as Marco Pierre White. Just that I smoke in my kitchen, too.) made so many of us everywhere say, 'I am not alone! There are others like me!' (I'm not saying, by the way, that I can cook anywhere near as well as Marco Pierre White. Just that I smoke in my kitchen, too.) Finally, there's England's greatest chef, or England's biggest bully, depending on which paper you're reading at the time the fearsome and prodigiously talented Gordon Ramsay. I'd been hearing about this guy for years. Ex-footballer. Formerly with Robuchon, Duca.s.se, Guy Savoy, Marco Pierre White. A legendary wordsmith in the kitchen famed for excoriating his crew, ejecting food critics, speaking his mind bluntly and undiplomatically. A while back, I was told about the cinema verite Boiling Point Boiling Point series, in which the beleaguered Ramsay was said to behave monstrously to his staff. Intrigued, I managed to track down a copy of the videotape series. To my mind, Ramsay was sympathetic from beginning to end. I rooted for him as he sweated out the beginning of a service period for a ma.s.sive banquet at Versailles, ill-equipped, with only a rent-a-staff of indolent bucket heads to help him. I cheered when he summarily dismissed a waiter for guzzling water in full view of the dining room. series, in which the beleaguered Ramsay was said to behave monstrously to his staff. Intrigued, I managed to track down a copy of the videotape series. To my mind, Ramsay was sympathetic from beginning to end. I rooted for him as he sweated out the beginning of a service period for a ma.s.sive banquet at Versailles, ill-equipped, with only a rent-a-staff of indolent bucket heads to help him. I cheered when he summarily dismissed a waiter for guzzling water in full view of the dining room. Pour decourager les autres Pour decourager les autres, I'm guessing. I suffered as he suffered the interminable wait for his much-hoped-for third Michelin star and was heartbroken when he didn't get it. (He since has.) Those who can't understand why a chef operating at Ramsay's level gets a little cranky, or who appears to be operating at a higher and more self-important pitch than their boss, simply don't understand what it's like to work in a professional kitchen. They certainly don't understand what it takes to be the best in that world. It is not only how well you can cook that makes a great chef, but your ability to cook brilliantly, day in and day out in an environment where a thousand things can go wrong, with a crew that oftentimes would just as happily be sticking up convenience stores, in a fickle, cost-conscious, capricious world where everybody is hoping that you fail.

Is he really such a complete b.a.s.t.a.r.d? Let's put it this way: On a recent visit to his restaurant in Chelsea, I recognized large numbers of staff both front and back of the house from Boiling Point Boiling Point. Years later and they're still there. When Ramsay walked out of Aubergine, the entire staff, service staff included an incredible forty-five people chose to go with him. That's really the most telling statistic. Does he still enjoy the loyalty of his crew? He does. No cook shows up every day in Gordon Ramsay's kitchen, works those kind of hours, offers themselves up daily to the rigors of a three-star service period, toiling in a small, hot s.p.a.ce where at any moment they could get a painful and humiliating a.s.s reaming because Gordon Ramsay is the biggest b.a.s.t.a.r.d or the biggest bully in England. They show up every day and work like Trojans because he's the best. Because when they finally walk out that door to seek their own fortunes, they won't even have to write up a resume. Say you worked for three years with Gordon Ramsay, and that's all any chef or owner should need to know.

There's another factor overlooked in the rush to brand Ramsay as rude, crude, brutish, and cruel. In the professional kitchen, if you look someone in the eye and call them a 'fat, worthless, syphilitic puddle of badger c.r.a.p' it doesn't mean you don't like them. It can be and often is a term of endearment.

Bottom line is, his food's good. After all, it is about the food, isn't it?

I had two meals at his restaurant in Chelsea, and both were absolutely world-cla.s.s. A great chef at the top of his game. There's yet another overlooked dimension to Ramsay that doesn't fit with the depiction of an uppity, lower-cla.s.s lout overlyjacked on testosterone. Ramsay was trained as a patissier. This is significant like discovering that a right-wing politician was a Bolshevik in his youth. Few chefs can really and truly bake. Most chefs, like me, harbor deep suspicions of their precise, overly fussy, somehow feminine, presentation-obsessed counterparts in the pastry section. All that sweet, sticky, messy, goopy, delicate stuff. Pastry, where everything must be carefully measured in exact increments and made the same way every single time is diametrically opposed to what most chefs live and breathe, the freedom to improvise, to throw a little of this and a little of that any d.a.m.n place they want. Ramsay's food resonates with his training in pastry. It is precise, colorful, artfully sculpted or teased into shape (though not too teased). It is the product of that end point in a chef's development the perfect balance of masculine and feminine, the yin and the yang, if you will.

What do I mean? Look at Roberto, my grill man. He's got a metal rod rammed through his eyebrow, a tattoo of a burning skull on his chest, muscles on his muscles. Rob Zombie and Metallica are his idea of easy listening. He's done jail time for a.s.sault. Not a guy you'd invite to an evening at the opera. But watch Roberto cook. He leans over that plate and delicately, carefully drizzles sauce from a favorite spoon, gently applies an outer ring of sauce, then sensuously drags a toothpick through it. He tastes everything. Looks at his plates with a decorator's eye for color and texture. Treats a filet of fish as tenderly and as lovingly as a woman's erect nipple. Piles cute, girly-little garnishes into high, cloudlike piles of gossamer-thin crunchiness. He's doing what everyone told him growing up that only women should do. (Ramsay's own father told him cooking was basically for poofs and that chefs were all ponces.) We work in ap.r.o.ns, for f.u.c.k's sake! You better have b.a.l.l.s the size of jackfruits if you want to cook at a high level, where an acute sense for flavor and design, as much as brutality and vigilance, is a virtue. And be fully prepared to bulldoze any miserable c.o.c.ksucker who gets in your way.

Both times I visited his restaurant, Ramsay was in the kitchen, supervising every dish that came out, riding his crew like rented mules. He wasn't gliding through the dining room, sucking up to his public. He's a cook in twenty-first-century England; that means he's an obsessive, paranoid, conspiratorial control freak. A hustler, media-manipulator, artist, craftsman, bully, and glory hound in short, a chef's chef. That I found him polite, charming, witty, and gracious and am saying so here will probably be an embarra.s.sment to him. For that, I apologize. His detractors should be so lucky as to taste the absolutely stunning braised beef and foie gras I ate at his restaurant a dish so sumptuous that I am forced to use that word. A ham hock terrine of really extraordinary subtlety and flavor, a lobster ravioli with fresh green pea puree that revealed as all food reveals its creator's true nature a level of perception and sensitivity that can be a liability in the mosh-pit subculture of professional kitchens. Here's a guy who risked everything in his career, many times over. He walked away from a career in football when it was made clear he'd never play in the bigs. He endured a procession of stages in some very tough French kitchens. He bolted from his first restaurant, entangling himself in potentially enormous liabilities just when he was in sight of the mountaintop. He loudly announced he was going for three Michelin stars and then stayed on course until he got them. Rather than kiss the a.s.ses of all those people who might under ordinary circ.u.mstances be expected to be helpful to him, he has consistently kicked them in the teeth or even viciously sucker punched them. It's very hard for me not to like a guy like that. And every day those stars are sitting on him like six-ton flagstones, defying any who might choose to try knocking them off.

England's worst boss? I don't think so. England's worst boss is the boss who doesn't give a f.u.c.k, someone who's wasting his employees' time, challenging them to do nothing more ambitious than show up. Understand that in no-name pit stops and casual dining establishments, it's just a mistake when a cook forgets a single unpeeled fava bean or a tiny smudge of grease, but in a three-star restaurant, it's treason. In the cruel mathematics of two- and three-star dining establishments, a customer who has a good meal will tell two or three people about it. A person who has an unsatisfactory meal will tell ten or twenty. It makes for a much more compelling anecdote. That one unpeeled fava bean is the end of the world. Or it could be.

As most really good cooks or commis working in similar circ.u.mstances will readily tell you: Mess with the chef at your peril. It's his name on the door.

Where Cooks Come From

There's a little town in Mexico where cooks come from.

If you're a chef and you've spent any serious time working in professional kitchens, you know what to do when Hector, your saucier, gets pinched for a.s.sault and you suddenly need a replacement. Faced with a situation where you need a French-trained, ready-to-go, reliable, hardworking guy who knows what to do when you need a solid flounder special and have time only to describe sole gren.o.bloise gren.o.bloise as 'filet saute . . . with capers, lemon, as 'filet saute . . . with capers, lemon, vin blanc vin blanc, shallot, b.u.t.ter,' you know where to go. Where do you tap into the source for the best French and Italian cooks? Not France. Certainly not Italy. If you're looking for a line cook who's professional in his work habits, responsible with your food, dependable, a guy with a sense of humor, reasonably good character, and a repertoire of French and Italian standards, and who can drill out 250 meals without going mental or cutting corners too egregiously, chances are you go to Carlos, your grill man, and say, 'Carlos, mi carnale mi carnale . . . I need a . . . I need a cucinero cucinero. You know somebody for saute?' In every likelihood, Carlos will think for a moment and say, 'Yeah . . . sure . . . I have a cousin.' Or 'Yeah . . . sure . . . I got a friend.' And a few days later, someone will show up at your kitchen door with features similar to Carlos's or the now-incarcerated Hector's and he'll step right into old Hector's station like it's a comfortable shoe. Hector, of course, was from the Mexican state of Puebla. As is Carlos. And just about every other cook and dishwasher in America. If there was a mandatory day of rest or a public holiday for all Poblanos a lot of restaurants in America would have to close their doors. As it is, the day after the fifth of May (Cinco de Mayo), half the cooks in America are hungover. Keep that in mind.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, we'd have been talking about cheap labor. You know, the old 'wetback' story: exploited, unskilled immigrant labor, toiling away for inhuman hours in menial jobs, paid cash under the table at minimum wage or less. Things have changed somewhat for the better. While we have yet to see as many mestizo-looking chefs with Spanish-sounding last names running high-end French kitchens as we should, all those dishwashers and porters didn't simply settle for spending the rest of their lives cleaning up after the rest of us. They watched, they learned, they trained on garde-manger garde-manger and grill and prep and saute usually on their own time and when some flighty white kid decided he wanted the winter off to go skiing in Colorado, they were ready to step in. When the French sous-chef appeared to be unable to work without a long, lingering two-hour lunch with his socialist comrades in the front of the house and the chef had finally had enough of his clock-punching, lazy prima donna act, the Poblanos were ready. Now, many areas of Puebla are like a talent pool of free-agent or draft picks in professional sports pursued, protected, sought after by chefs who'd rather snip off a pinkie finger than lose them to the other team. They've been trained by a procession of French, American, and Italian chefs most of whom come and go, turning over quickly, but who each leave behind a little knowledge, a new technique, a few more nuggets of information, some new ideas. So now, ask Carlos to do something with the soft-sh.e.l.l crabs and with that old asparagus and you can have a reasonable expectation that he will whip right into a salad of soft-sh.e.l.l crabs with asparagus and citrus vinaigrette in cla.s.sic French nouvelle style. Stuck for a monkfish special or a soup? Don't worry, Carlos is all over it, remembering some long-gone French chef's preparation. (Old Henri-Pierre may have been a lazy Communist ratbag, but he could cook like an angel.) A lot of times, I'll walk into an unfamiliar kitchen to say h.e.l.lo to the cooks or to thank the chef for a freebie and I'll see the familiar posse of white-clad Mexicans listening to the Spanish station down by the dishwas.h.i.+ng area, and of course I'll say h.e.l.lo, then casually inquire where, exactly, they hail from. and grill and prep and saute usually on their own time and when some flighty white kid decided he wanted the winter off to go skiing in Colorado, they were ready to step in. When the French sous-chef appeared to be unable to work without a long, lingering two-hour lunch with his socialist comrades in the front of the house and the chef had finally had enough of his clock-punching, lazy prima donna act, the Poblanos were ready. Now, many areas of Puebla are like a talent pool of free-agent or draft picks in professional sports pursued, protected, sought after by chefs who'd rather snip off a pinkie finger than lose them to the other team. They've been trained by a procession of French, American, and Italian chefs most of whom come and go, turning over quickly, but who each leave behind a little knowledge, a new technique, a few more nuggets of information, some new ideas. So now, ask Carlos to do something with the soft-sh.e.l.l crabs and with that old asparagus and you can have a reasonable expectation that he will whip right into a salad of soft-sh.e.l.l crabs with asparagus and citrus vinaigrette in cla.s.sic French nouvelle style. Stuck for a monkfish special or a soup? Don't worry, Carlos is all over it, remembering some long-gone French chef's preparation. (Old Henri-Pierre may have been a lazy Communist ratbag, but he could cook like an angel.) A lot of times, I'll walk into an unfamiliar kitchen to say h.e.l.lo to the cooks or to thank the chef for a freebie and I'll see the familiar posse of white-clad Mexicans listening to the Spanish station down by the dishwas.h.i.+ng area, and of course I'll say h.e.l.lo, then casually inquire where, exactly, they hail from.

' Poblanos?' I'll ask, pretty sure of the answer. Poblanos?' I'll ask, pretty sure of the answer.

' Viva la rasa!' will come the reply. Viva la rasa!' will come the reply.

My cooks are almost all from Puebla, and not just from Puebla but from the same small area around the towns of Izucar de Matamoros, Atlixco, and Tlapa.n.a.la, situated downwind from the famous volcanoes of Under the Volcano Under the Volcano fame. If there's an epicenter of fine French cooking, it appears to be Tlapa.n.a.la, a sleepy little village surrounded by sugarcane fields and mango trees, about three miles outside of Izucar. That's where my sous-chef, Edilberto Perez, was born. It's where Isidoro, my veteran grill man, hails from, and Antonio, my roundsman, and other cooks, runners, prep cooks, and dishwashers, past, present, and future. Their families still live there and they visit whenever possible. Over the years, I've heard a lot about the town, about Eddie's house, his ranch, about his uncle, the fame. If there's an epicenter of fine French cooking, it appears to be Tlapa.n.a.la, a sleepy little village surrounded by sugarcane fields and mango trees, about three miles outside of Izucar. That's where my sous-chef, Edilberto Perez, was born. It's where Isidoro, my veteran grill man, hails from, and Antonio, my roundsman, and other cooks, runners, prep cooks, and dishwashers, past, present, and future. Their families still live there and they visit whenever possible. Over the years, I've heard a lot about the town, about Eddie's house, his ranch, about his uncle, the heladero heladero, who makes ice cream the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, about Antonio's family, who live next door, about my prep cook Bautista's former street gang, the terrifying Vatos Locos, whose distinctive tag I often find scrawled on locker room walls, and whose hand signs (a 'V' and an 'L', signified by turning the right hand and making a sort of open-thumbed peace sign) I recognize. I heard about my prep guy Miguel's family's pulqueria pulqueria, Isidoro's family's candy store. I heard a lot about the joys of barbacoa barbacoa (Mexican-style barbecue), (Mexican-style barbecue), mole mole, pulque pulque: I wanted to go. I wanted to go very badly. I told my cooks how I'd visit their parents and tell them all what desgraciados desgraciados their sons have become, now that they're living that their sons have become, now that they're living that vida loca vida loca in New York. So, when I first started putting together my ' in New York. So, when I first started putting together my 'Borrachon Abroad' pitch for my publisher, I knew one of the places I absolutely had to go. I huddled with my sous-chef and said, 'Eddie, I want to visit your town. I want you to go with me, to show me your town. I want to meet everybody's families. I want your mom to cook for me, if she's willing. I want to drink Abroad' pitch for my publisher, I knew one of the places I absolutely had to go. I huddled with my sous-chef and said, 'Eddie, I want to visit your town. I want you to go with me, to show me your town. I want to meet everybody's families. I want your mom to cook for me, if she's willing. I want to drink pulque pulque and and mezcal mezcal and eat and eat menudo menudo and and pozole pozole and real and real mole poblano mole poblano like from Puebla and like from Puebla and barbacoa barbacoa like you been tellin' me about all these years. I want to wear a cool-looking cowboy hat, ride a horse, find out where that serial killer Bautista really comes from. I want to go down there with you and have a really good time. We'll get the TV people to pay for it.' like you been tellin' me about all these years. I want to wear a cool-looking cowboy hat, ride a horse, find out where that serial killer Bautista really comes from. I want to go down there with you and have a really good time. We'll get the TV people to pay for it.'

'Let me call to my wife,' said Eddie, inspired. 'I send her down first to making the preparations.'

Which is how it happened that I found myself sitting by the mercado mercado in the small central square of Tlapa.n.a.la on a languid late afternoon, the sun slowly setting, watching as the women and children of the village lined up at the telephone kiosk, waiting to receive prearranged calls from kitchens in New York and apartments in Queens. in the small central square of Tlapa.n.a.la on a languid late afternoon, the sun slowly setting, watching as the women and children of the village lined up at the telephone kiosk, waiting to receive prearranged calls from kitchens in New York and apartments in Queens.

The streets were quiet and dusty, kids kicking around old soccer b.a.l.l.s, shooting hoops in the court by the mercado mercado, where old women sold chilis, squashes, chayote chayote, yucca, and vegetables. Occasionally, an old man pa.s.sed by, driving a few head of cattle, a herd of goats, a few donkeys down Tlapa.n.a.la's tidy streets. A stray dog wandered over to see if I had any food. Young mothers sat with their babies. Children, still in their school uniforms, played on the back steps of the kiosk, the afternoon's silence broken now and again by the singsong music from a propane truck, playing along to the unforgettable chant of 'Gaaazzz! GaaaaAAAaazz! GaaaaAAAaazz!' and announcements over a loudspeaker describing the products on sale at the mercado mercado. At four o' clock, the peal of the bread alarm informed residents that fresh bread, hot out of the oven, was now available at the bakery.

A few yards behind me were the railway tracks. The train to Tijuana and beyond. Nueva York. The road out, the starting point, where generations of Tlapa.n.a.la's young men began their long, hard climb out of poverty to become cooks in faraway America.

There were few young men left in the village. I saw only women, children, and much older men. In Tlapa.n.a.la, you can tell the homes of families with a son or a father standing behind a stove in New York: They're the houses with the satellite dishes on the roofs and metal rebars still protruding from the top of new additions and annexes (instead of capping or removing the extra lengths, they keep them sticking up out of the concrete; should money come, they can more easily add a second floor). I sat on my bench, contentedly watching and listening, an object of curiosity, a lone gabacho gabacho drinking drinking cerveza cerveza Modelo, grinning for no apparent reason. Looking down the street, I spied my sous-chef taking an evening stroll with his wife, new baby propped on his arm, young daughter trailing behind, holding her daddy's other hand. Thirteen years ago, Eddie took that train behind me to Tijuana, swam and waded across the border, then hopped a train to New York. He slept on the subway for his first few weeks, slept on the floors of friends' apartments when he could, until he got a job as a night porter. Now he's a sous-chef, a t.i.tle inadequate to describe his importance. He's opened and worked at every restaurant in the company Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Miami, Le Marais and, of course, for me at the mothers.h.i.+p in New York. Long before I arrived on the scene, he'd been the go-to guy for every chef who walked in the door. Now he's a fully doc.u.mented permanent resident (and soon-to-be citizen) of the United States of America, and a newly enrolled student at the French Culinary Inst.i.tute, where he hobn.o.bs with culinary luminaries like Jacques Pepin and Andre Soltner. (He's learning where all that French food he's been making brilliantly for years really comes from and why. Eddie knows how to make a Modelo, grinning for no apparent reason. Looking down the street, I spied my sous-chef taking an evening stroll with his wife, new baby propped on his arm, young daughter trailing behind, holding her daddy's other hand. Thirteen years ago, Eddie took that train behind me to Tijuana, swam and waded across the border, then hopped a train to New York. He slept on the subway for his first few weeks, slept on the floors of friends' apartments when he could, until he got a job as a night porter. Now he's a sous-chef, a t.i.tle inadequate to describe his importance. He's opened and worked at every restaurant in the company Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Miami, Le Marais and, of course, for me at the mothers.h.i.+p in New York. Long before I arrived on the scene, he'd been the go-to guy for every chef who walked in the door. Now he's a fully doc.u.mented permanent resident (and soon-to-be citizen) of the United States of America, and a newly enrolled student at the French Culinary Inst.i.tute, where he hobn.o.bs with culinary luminaries like Jacques Pepin and Andre Soltner. (He's learning where all that French food he's been making brilliantly for years really comes from and why. Eddie knows how to make a gastrite gastrite, he just didn't know what to call it. I wish I could watch him in cla.s.s, when they show him glacage or how to make a liaison, or explain the principles of deglacer. He'll say, 'Oh, that! No problem. Same like for the ravioli at Les Halles.') Eddie rents an apartment in Park Slope, owns both a house and a small ranch in his home town of Tlapa.n.a.la and considerable livestock. He's an employer in Mexico, a role model and leader in New York. And he's my friend. I wish I could take even the slightest credit for the Edilberto Perez story. But I can't. He did it all. Watching him walk the streets of the place he was born, though, I was filled with pride just for knowing him, and for being lucky enough to have worked with him. Before visiting Eddie, however, I'd had a grim duty to perform. Yet another forced march to television entertainment. 'Tony . . . Tony . . . listen. It's a food show. It's going on the Food Network. We need some variety! We can't just show you hanging around in Puebla, getting drunk with your sous-chef! Don't worry! We're on it. We've got some really special ideas.'

That's why I went first to the state of Oaxaca. So I could be force-fed iguana.

Reasons Why You Don't Want to Be on Television: Number Four in a Series I was in Puerto Angel, a fis.h.i.+ng village on the Pacific coast, staying at a remote, kooky, overgrown retreat built around a ravine on the slopes of a mountain overlooking the sea. The only other residents were Martin, my driver; two shooters; a burned-out geriatric hippie known as 'Quiet Dave,' who spoke in a s.p.a.cey whisper; the proprietor and his wife and a.s.sistants; and a former CIA chief of base for Nha Trang during the Vietnam War and his Chinese girlfriend. As I'd just been to Nha Trang, we had a lot to talk about.

Here's what I hoped for in Puerto Angel: a neglected stretch of beach, a near-empty, far from luxurious hotel, a few straggling eccentrics. Down the road a ways was the resort town of Zipolite, a sort of Last Stop for well-toasted surfers, backpackers, beach b.u.ms, fugitive dope pilots from the seventies, the itinerant jewelry/handicraft set. It's the sort of place you wake up in after dropping one hit of acid too many at your 112th Grateful Dead concert not having any idea how you got there, and far from caring.

We shot a whole-roasted-snapper scene in Zipolite, watched the fis.h.i.+ng boats come in at Puerto Angel, the whole town running to meet them as they skipped full throttle through the waves and onto the beach, hulls loaded with fresh tuna. We drove to Huatulco, about twenty miles away, with the idea of doing some snorkel fis.h.i.+ng. It was one of those ludicrous, pointless exercises in television artifice so beloved by people who look at life largely through a lens: 'Get some cool underwater shots of Tony! We can have him fish with a local! Cut to medium shots of Tony, looking hunky in a Speedo, in chef mode, grillin' and chillin' on the beach, sun setting dramatically in the background!'

Video gold.

After two hours of useless and unproductive floundering in the sea, the underwater camera rig having filled up with water after about six miles of footage of my concave chest wheezing on the beach while Leo, our hired fis.h.i.+ng guide, continued, without success, to catch even a stunt fish for a faked shot we gave up. Matthew settled for frozen fish at a nearby tourist strip, and the always popular 'Tony gets drunk on local beverage, then sits in sullen silence, hating himself and everybody to do with this production scene.'

I never wanted to eat iguana. 'Yes you do,' insisted the TV masterminds. I had no particular curiosity about iguana. I knew from talking to my cooks that people eat iguana when they can afford nothing else. It's cheap and plentiful. Even Leo, talking about how he went out a few times a week with his dog to sniff out iguana, admitted he did it only because he had no money for real food. I had no expectation that a big lizard would taste good and I was not anxious to have one killed so I could find out for sure. But Matthew seemed to feel that the 'iguana scene' would be must-see TV, a guaranteed cable Ace for Best Reptile Scene in a Continuing Cable Series.

Now, maybe somewhere they're making delicious marinated, then barbecued iguana with crispy skin and well-grilled but tender meat. Maybe if you sear it and then braise it long enough and infuse it with enough other flavors, it might make a meal interesting to adventurous palates. Maybe. I didn't see it.

The owner of our hotel was dispatched to wrangle up a nice plump example of iguanadom at its very best. But after three or four hours of investigation, he came up as empty as Leo's fis.h.i.+ng line. Instead, he decided to sacrifice the poor hotel mascot, a ten-year-old wrinkly, leathery, liver-spotted thing he looked paralytic with a bifurcated tail and a troublingly agreeable nature. I took one look at the creature and tried very hard to weasel out of the meal.

'Matthew! Jesus Christ, man! He's a pet, for f.u.c.k's sake! Let the thing live! How good can he be? Just look at him!'

The hotel proprietor was no help. Stroking the iguana's belly, he insisted, 'Look! He is ready. He wants to die.' I was appalled.

What arrived later were iguana tamales: the hotel pet, boiled, sectioned, then simply wrapped in corn husk with masa masa and sauce. Next to and sauce. Next to natto natto, it was maybe the worst thing I'd ever had between my teeth. The iguana was undercooked. When I unwrapped my tamale, I found that I had been honored with the head and a forearm still on the bone. The texture was like chewing on GI Joe if Joe had been resting at the bottom of a long-neglected turtle tank. There was almost no meat to speak of, just tough, rubbery skin, k.n.o.bby, slimy little bones. When I managed now and again actually to winnow out a little meat from between bones and skin, I was sorry I had. It was dark, oily, and viscous, with the pungent aroma of steamed salamander.

In the thankfully brief scene you see in the edited version, I look like I'm eating at gunpoint.

I hit the city of Oaxaca next, a place justifiably famous for its food. It's a beautiful town: lovely hacienda-style hotels, exquisite Spanish churches and cathedrals, a picturesque zocalo zocalo where you can sit at a cafe table and watch the world go by, a fabulous where you can sit at a cafe table and watch the world go by, a fabulous mercado mercado, nice people. It is also, unfortunately, a magnet for the world's ugliest tourists. Herds of squinting, sun-blotched f.a.n.n.y packers in black socks and sandals shuffled by, snapping pictures. Extravagantly pierced backpackers, filthy from the road, sat in the park, ineptly strumming old Dylan tunes on clapped-out guitars. Thick-ankled German women looking for love, and hordes of doddering tour groupers and serial shoppers, fanned out to buy the inevitable tonnage of papier-mache figurines, hammered tin, cheap silver, ponchos, serapes, funny hats, T-s.h.i.+rts, and pottery. College kids, fresh from the donkey show in Tijuana, sulked noisily on benches, broke and frustrated, waiting for a Western Union money order from mom and dad. But as it got late and the tourists drifted off and the locals began showing up in clean white guayaberas and frilly dresses, filling the cafe tables around us, Martin, my driver, and I started to enjoy ourselves.

Mezcal Mezcal was served like tequila, in shot gla.s.ses, accompanied by chasers of was served like tequila, in shot gla.s.ses, accompanied by chasers of sangrita sangrita, a spicy tomato juice concoction. With the de rigueur wedge of lime came a mix of salt and dried, powdered, chili-roasted maguey worms an unexpectedly delicious accompaniment. Martin and I sat in the cafe, nibbling on tortas tortas (sandwiches) of fresh cheese and ham, drinking beer and (sandwiches) of fresh cheese and ham, drinking beer and mezcal mezcal, a mariachi band strolling from table to table. Behind us, a man in his fifties, with a face scarred by a youthful bout with smallpox and the fists and brows of a former pugilist, sat alone at his table, drinking Modelo Negro, his straight black hair plastered down over his forehead, staring into s.p.a.ce with a look of infinite sadness. After a long while sitting in silence with the same brooding expression, he motioned the mariachis over to his table, handed them a few pesos, and made a mumbled request. They played beautifully, and when they were done with the song, the man, though outwardly unmoved, handed them more pesos and asked for another. Again, his demeanor remained impa.s.sive as he monopolized the six-piece band.