A Cook's Tour Part 9

'You should fire the c.o.c.ksucker' was my suggestion. I didn't have to think too long about it, either.

'I know . . . I know. I should . . . But . . . I just can't,' he said, rubbing his face.

'Listen. Let me get this straight,' I said. 'Just so we both know what we're talkin' about here . . . You're the chef, right?'

'Yes.'

'And your sous-chef, your underboss, is talking treason behind your back . . . disobeying your orders, causing discontent, disgruntlement, desertion . . . possible mutiny among the troops?'

'Well . . . yeah . . . I guess so. I mean, maybe he doesn't mean to. He's just trying to '

'This guy's a f.u.c.kin' lone wolf! He's a loose cannon! He's gotta go!' I snarled, surprising myself with how viscerally involved I suddenly was in the chef's problem. 'I don't care if he's your bestest, dearest, closest buddy since you were babies. This mutt has gotta go. The sous-chef's number-one job is what? To make the chef look good. At all times. He's not there so that every time you come back from a day off there's some kinda problem you gotta deal with. Is he making you look good with this s.h.i.+t he's pullin'?'

'No,' admitted the chef. 'It's not good. Things are all f.u.c.ked up.'

'That alone is enough . . . And he's talking trash about you when you're not around? Forget it! You gotta cut this cancer out before it kills you.'

'I know.' He sniffled. 'I know.'

'Look,' I said, softening. 'I know what you're going through. I fired my own best friend and sous-chef at least . . . what . . . three times. We're still friends. He's still my best friend. He's just not my sous-chef anymore. And you know what? After you kick this guy out, this kid'll go on and get his own chef's job. He'll be calling you up and apologizing for all the stuff he pulled when he was here. He'll know. He'll find out what a chef needs and expects in a sous. It's business. That's all. But it's serious business. That's what you forgot to tell him. Kiss this guy on the mouth and say, "Fredo, you broke my heart." Then whack him. But don't wait.'

'You're right . . . you're right . . .'

'Next time you're hiring a sous, do like I do. Take him out to a nice bar. Buy him a drink before you close the deal. Then give him the Talk. Let him know right up front. I say, "I'm the nicest, sweetest guy in the world. You call me at four o'clock in the morning needing bail money? I'm there for you. I'm not going to be riding your a.s.s like some other chefs will. I won't humiliate you in front of your crew or anybody else. You don't have to address me as 'Chef' all the time. I've got a sense of humor and in my off hours I'm a depraved, degenerate animal just like you. You will like working with me. We'll have fun . . . But if you ever f.u.c.k me, talk s.h.i.+t about me behind my back, drop the ball, show up late, or show disloyalty in any way, I don't care if you're my dearest friend, I don't care if you saved my f.u.c.king life, life, I I will will fire your sorry a.s.s like I'm blowing my f.u.c.king nose. Do we understand each other? Is that clear? And do you want me to write it down?" That's what's called "fair warning". You've drawn the lines. He crosses them and it's bye-bye. You let him know up front what a vicious, cold-blooded motherf.u.c.ker you can be. That way, there're no surprises.' fire your sorry a.s.s like I'm blowing my f.u.c.king nose. Do we understand each other? Is that clear? And do you want me to write it down?" That's what's called "fair warning". You've drawn the lines. He crosses them and it's bye-bye. You let him know up front what a vicious, cold-blooded motherf.u.c.ker you can be. That way, there're no surprises.'

The chef seemed considerably cheered by my inspiring little lecture. 'Thanks, man,' he said. 'I'm sorry for dropping all this on you. I knew what I had to do and all . . . It's just . . . I guess I needed to hear somebody else say it.' Then he reached into the pocket of his chef coat and offered me a b.u.mp from a big bag of white powder.

Maybe his sous-chef wasn't his only problem.

Reasons Why You Don't Want to Be on Television: Number Five in a Series 'C'mon, Tony! You've been to Cambodia, for Chrissakes! How bad can it be?' said the television producer. 'We can't do a whole show on one restaurant! This will be funny! They're looking forward to cooking for you!' What he'd arranged, what he had in mind, was for me to venture into the real heart of darkness, deep, deep into enemy territory, to Berkeley, and a vegan potluck dinner.

I've said some pretty hateful things about vegetarians, I know. In spite of this, many of them have been very nice to me over the past year. Though I think I have at various times referred to them as 'Hezbollah-like' and as 'the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit,' they come to my readings, write me nice letters. My publicist in England, whom I adore, is a veg (though I've forced her at gunpoint to eat fish a few times), as are a couple of the shooters I've worked with. They've shown remarkable good humor, considering how I feel about their predilections. There have been lots of vegheads who've been very kind and generous these last few months, in spite of the fact that they know that at the first opportunity, when they're drunk or vulnerable, I'm getting a bacon cheeseburger down their throats. That doesn't mean I wanted to sit in some hilltop A-frame eating lentils out of a pot with a bunch of Nader supporters and hairy-legged earth mothers in caftans. I certainly didn't want to visit 'them' on their home turf. If nothing else, I was reasonably certain that smoking would be a problem.

I'm going to try really try to be nice here.

I went along with the producer's scheme. Fair is fair. The opposition should be given every chance to prove the righteousness of their cause or at least the merits of their case. The people coming to the dinner, the folks who'd be cooking for me, were all serious vegans. Cookbook authors. Vegan cookery teachers. People who spent lots of time going to seminars, cla.s.ses, corresponding with others of their ilk on-line, in chat rooms, and at conventions and informal gatherings. Maybe, just maybe, they had something to show me. Maybe it was possible to make something good without meat, or stock, or b.u.t.ter, or cheese, or dairy products of any kind. Who was I to sneer? The world, I had recently found out, was a big, strange, and wonderful place. I'd eaten tree grubs and worms and sheep's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. How bad could it be?

Bad.

The vegans I visited did not live in a converted ashram on a hilltop, tending to their crops in bare feet or Birkenstocks. No one was named Rainbow or Sunflower. Only one person wore a sari. My hosts lived in a kempt modern luxury home in an exclusive area of the suburbs, surrounded by green lawns and s.h.i.+ny new BMWs and SUVs. They were, all of them, affluent-looking professionals and executives. Ranging in age from late thirties to early fifties, they were well dressed, unfailingly nice, eager to show me the other side of the argument.

And not one of them could cook a f.u.c.king vegetable.

Fergus Henderson, the grand master of blood and guts cookery, shows more respect for the simple side of sauteed baby spinach on some of his plates than any of these deluded vegans showed me in ten elaborate courses. Green salads were dressed hours before being served, ensuring that they had wilted into nutrition-free sludge. The knife work even from the cooking teachers present was clumsy and inept, resembling the lesser efforts of younger members of the Barney Rubble clan. The vegetables every time were uniformly overcooked, underseasoned, nearly colorless, and abused, any flavor, texture, and lingering vitamin content leeched out. Painstaking re-creations of 'cheese', 'yogurt' and 'cream' made from various unearthly soy products tasted, invariably, like caulking compound, and my hosts, though good-humored and friendly to the hostile stranger in their midst, seemed terrified, even angry, about something nebulous in their pasts. Every time I asked one of them how and when exactly they had decided to forgo all animal products, the answer always seemed to involve a personal tragedy or disappointment unrelated to food.

'I got a divorce,' began one. 'I lost my job,' said another. 'Heart attack,' offered another. 'I broke up with my . . .' 'When I decided to move out of LA, I started thinking about things . . .'

In every case, it appeared to me (in my jaundiced way of thinking anyway) that something had soured them on the world they'd once embraced and that they now sought new rules to live by, another orthodoxy, something else to believe in. 'Did you read about the PCBs in striped ba.s.s?' one whispered urgently, as if comforted by the news. 'I saw on-line where they're pumping steroids into cattle,' said another breathlessly, every snippet of bad news from the health front a victory for their cause. They seemed to spend an awful lot of time confirming their fears and suspicions of the world outside their own, combing the Internet for stories of radioactive dairy products, genetically altered beets, polluted fish, carcinogenic sausages, spongiform-riddled meat, the hideous Grand Guignol chamber of horror abattoirs and slaughterhouses.

They also seemed curiously oblivious to the fact that much of the world goes to bed hungry every night, that our basic design features as humans, from the beginning of our evolution, developed around the very real need to hunt down slower, stupider animals, kill them, and eat them. 'Don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night craving bacon?' I asked.

'No. Never,' replied every single one of them. 'I've never felt so healthy in my life.'

It was difficult for me to be polite (though I was outnumbered). I'd recently returned from Cambodia, where a chicken can be the difference between life and death. These people in their comfortable suburban digs were carping about cruelty to animals but suggesting that everyone in the world, from suburban Yuppie to starving Cambodian cyclo driver, start buying organic vegetables and expensive soy subst.i.tutes. To look down on entire cultures that've based everything on the gathering of fish and rice seemed arrogant in the extreme. (I've heard of vegans feeding their dogs vegetarian meals. Now that's cruelty to animals.) And the hypocrisy of it all p.i.s.sed me off. Just being able to talk about this issue in reasonably grammatical language is a privilege, subsidized in a yin/yang sort of a way, somewhere, by somebody taking it in the neck. Being able to read these words, no matter how stupid, offensive, or wrongheaded, is a privilege, your reading skills the end product of a level of education most of the world will never enjoy. Our whole lives our homes, the shoes we wear, the cars we drive, the food we eat are all built on a mountain of skulls. Meat, say the PETA folks, is 'murder.' And yes, the wide world of meat eating can seem like a panorama of cruelty at times. But is meat 'murder'? f.u.c.k no.

Murder, as one of my Khmer pals might tell you, is what his next-door neighbor did to his whole family back in the seventies. Murder is what happens in Cambodia, in parts of Africa, Central and South America, and in former Soviet republics when the police chief's idiot son decides he wants to turn your daughter into a wh.o.r.e and you don't like the idea. Murder is what Hutus do to Tutsis, Serbs to Croats, Russians to Uzbeks, Crips to Bloods. And vice versa. It's black Chevy Suburbans (which, more than likely, US taxpayers paid for) pulling up outside your house at three in the morning and dragging away your suspiciously unpatriotic and overopinionated son. Murder is what that man sitting across from you in Phnom Penh does for a living so he can afford a satellite dish for his roof, so he can watch our Airwolf Airwolf reruns, MTV Asia, and Pam Anderson running in slow motion down a Southern California beach. reruns, MTV Asia, and Pam Anderson running in slow motion down a Southern California beach.

Hide in your fine homes and eat vegetables, I was thinking. Put a Greenpeace or NAACP b.u.mper sticker on your Beemer if it makes you feel better (so you can drive your kids to their all-white schools). Save the rainforest by all means so maybe you can visit it someday, on an ecotour, wearing comfortable shoes made by twelve-year-olds in forced labor. Save a whale while millions are still sold into slavery, starved, f.u.c.ked to death, shot, tortured, forgotten. When you see cute little kids crying in rubble next to Sally Struthers somewhere, be sure to send a few dollars.

d.a.m.n! I was going to try and be nice.

But then, I wasn't in San Francisco to be nice. I wasn't there to investigate, experience, or explain the full sweep of NoCal culture and cuisine, to bring enlightenment or illumination or a new perspective to a complex and interesting subject. I was in the region for one reason and one reason alone: to eat at the French Laundry.

I was worried about this part of the jaunt. Even getting a reservation at the Laundry can be a lengthy and difficult process, and the prospect of chef/owner Thomas Keller allowing me, Mr Obnoxious Don't Eat Fish on Monday, to eat in his dining room at short notice while a camera crew shot the kitchen and dining room during service seemed doubtful. Keller, very likely America's greatest homegrown chef, had, as I pointed out in an E-mail to him, absolutely nothing to gain by allowing my spiteful presence through his doors. A journeyman knucklehead like me was hardly going to dazzle or impress. Instead, I threw myself cravenly at his mercy, pleaded for any consideration I could get: Professional courtesy? Curiosity? Pity? I'd take it, I told him, anyway I could get it.

Being the shrewd, conspiratorial, paranoid second-guesser that I am, I made d.a.m.n sure, while Keller considered my request, to pad my guest list for the proposed meal with the heaviest-hitting, friend-in-common, high-octane bunch I could find. Even if Keller thought me an utter swine and an opportunistic hustler, my dinner companions would be sure to get his attention.

I put my end of dinner at the French Laundry together like a bank job. Enticed through threats, promises, and guarantees of an all-expenses-paid trip to what was sure to be a memorable meal, they came one by one. They knew who Thomas Keller was, just as he surely knew them.

From Palm Beach, dragged away from Easter dinner with his family, came Michael Ruhlman, the coauthor (with Keller) of The French Laundry Cookbook The French Laundry Cookbook. We'd met only recently, at an evening of senseless debauchery and overindulgence at the Siberia Bar in New York. He'd written two other books, The Making of a Chef The Making of a Chef and and The Soul of a Chef The Soul of a Chef, which I'd really enjoyed; I'd found from his prose that Michael, like no other nonchef writers I know, understands the glories of veal stock, the grim realities of kitchen grease, the hard kernel of truth about what really makes people want to cook professionally and why. He generously agreed to join me in my bold but weird venture.

Scott Bryan flew in from New York. He's an old crony by now. I'd met him through his food. I'm a regular customer at his three-star restaurant, Veritas, and we've become friends over the years. If you ever read in the papers about some ugly incident at a midtown bar involving me, a blunt object, and a vegetarian, chances are Scott will have been in the room when they clapped on the manacles. I'd written gus.h.i.+ngly (and sincerely) about him in my earlier book, and I a.s.sured him that even though there would be TV cameras floating around like airborne pests, there was no script, no plan, and that all he had to do was show up in San Francisco, pile into a car, and eat what would very likely be a fantastic meal.

Eric Ripert, the chef of the four-star Manhattan restaurant Le Bernardin, flew in from Los Angeles. Here's a guy who is everything I am not: He has four stars, a resume of nothing but world-cla.s.s kitchens, incredible natural talent, top-drawer skills, and movie-star good looks. He's not even American; he hails from Andorra, a minicountry in the Pyrenees. That he entered my life after reading my book, I always secretly attributed to his all-too-well-remembered apprentices.h.i.+p days, when he must have experienced something in common with the desperate, debauched hustlers, strivers, and journeymen discussed in its pages. (Though I have a very hard time ever picturing Eric knocking out eggs Benedict like I did for so many years.) He has, by the way, what is perhaps the best independent intelligence network running in New York and maybe the whole country. The NSA has nothing on this guy. If it happens in a kitchen anywhere, Eric knows about it ten minutes later. He's also the most bulls.h.i.+t-free 'French' chef I've ever met.

They arrived, one by one, at my motel all of us, it turned out, dressed for dinner in nearly identical black suits, dark ties, and dark sungla.s.ses. Whatever collective coolness I may have thought we had evaporated immediately when I got a look at the car the TV folks had rented to take us out to dinner. It was a half-mile-long gleaming white stretch limo, a hideous rubemobile that practically begged for us to change into powder-blue ruffled s.h.i.+rts and pastel orange tuxes. I was mortified. Already extremely nervous about our reception and this much-antic.i.p.ated meal, here we were, planning to arrive in the rural Napa Valley community of Yountville in a car more suitable to some lottery-winning yokel on his way to the county fair to sell off his prize hogs.

When you talk to most really talented 'star' chefs, the words I I and and me me and and my my tend to come up a lot. Nothing wrong with that it takes a big ego to do what chefs do, to keep them going in the face of absurd odds, uncertain outcomes, long hours in hot s.p.a.ces. tend to come up a lot. Nothing wrong with that it takes a big ego to do what chefs do, to keep them going in the face of absurd odds, uncertain outcomes, long hours in hot s.p.a.ces.

'My cuisine . . .' 'My cooking . . .' 'My kitchen . . .' 'My cooks . . .' 'My approach to food . . .'

You've heard that before. I do it all the time. So it's striking to talk with Thomas Keller, to listen to this quiet, surprisingly modest man describe his restaurant as an inst.i.tution not as a personal enterprise or as the sp.a.w.n of his own personal genius. Here's the guy whose cookbook is widely seen as the ultimate in food p.o.r.n. Upon the mention of the chef's name, other chefs no matter how great become strangely silent, uncomfortable-looking, even frightened. In a subculture where most of us are all too happy to slag anybody at any time, you never hear anyone even the French talk trash about Keller. (One Frenchman, I believe, even called him the 'greatest French chef in the world.') What's missing from all the wild praise of Keller, his cooks, his restaurant, and his cookbook is how different he is. You can't honestly use terms like the best the best or or better better or even or even perfect perfect when you're talking about Thomas Keller, because he's not really competing with anybody. He's playing a game whose rules are known only to him. He's doing things most chefs would never attempt in ways unthinkable to most. Everything about him and the French Laundry experience is different from most fine dining experiences; and Keller himself is a thing apart, a man hunting much bigger game, with very different ambitions than most of his peers. when you're talking about Thomas Keller, because he's not really competing with anybody. He's playing a game whose rules are known only to him. He's doing things most chefs would never attempt in ways unthinkable to most. Everything about him and the French Laundry experience is different from most fine dining experiences; and Keller himself is a thing apart, a man hunting much bigger game, with very different ambitions than most of his peers.

Talking with the man as he walked through a small farm that grows him vegetables, watching his chef de cuisine pull baby leeks and garlic right out of the ground for that night's dinner and later, as he showed us around the grounds of the French Laundry after dinner, when he sat with us in the dark garden, sipping an after-work gla.s.s of wine it was evident how unusual his priorities are and to what lengths he is willing to go to attain them. The building itself looks like an una.s.suming country home, rustic-looking wood and stone, surrounded by green fields, farmlands, and vineyards in the small community of Yountville in the Napa Valley. There are two stories, an upstairs deck with a plain wooden bal.u.s.trade, and a pretty garden. The decor, like the service, is una.s.suming, comfortably casual, with everything the room, the wait staff, the view of the hills outside the windows and through the French doors conspiring to put the diner at ease. The service, though relentlessly sharp and efficient, is not stiff or intimidating. The waiters are neither too friendly nor too distant.

'It looks like France,' said Eric, gazing out the window. For Keller, the French Laundry is a cause. It is the culmination of a philosophy shared by the people who work with him. Every detail is inseparable from the whole, whether it's new steps to the porch or a new dish on the menu. He brought up the famous Taillevent in Paris as an example of the kind of place he aspires to leave behind someday. 'You don't know the chef's name at Taillevent, do you? No. It's the restaurant you remember the inst.i.tution. The tradition.' Though he's a legendary perfectionist, lives next door to his kitchen, and takes a hands-on approach to every tiny detail, what he has created in Yountville is a place inseparable from its community and suppliers, where the absolute best ingredients are treated with the highest degree of respect.

Think I'm exaggerating? Maybe I've gone over to the dark side flacking for a chef I hope will someday throw me a freebie, maybe blurb my next book? No, you haven't seen how he handles fish, gently laying it down on the board and caressing it, approaching it warily, respectfully, as if communicating with an old friend.

Maybe you've heard some of the stories. That he used to make his cooks climb up into the range hoods each day to scrub out the grease personally. How he stores his fish belly-down, in the swimming position. That every fava bean in his kitchen is peeled raw (never soaked). How his mise-en-place mise-en-place, his station prep, is always at an absolute minimum everything made fresh. Maybe you've heard about his unbelievably beautiful, elaborate fifteen fifteen-course tasting menus, seen pictures of food so perilously balanced, so perfectly posed, that you don't know how it ever gets to the table. They feed about eighty-five people a night at the French Laundry. They employ, all told, about eighty-five people. An army of similarly dedicated purveyors comb lonely stretches of the Pacific Northwest at night, some armed only with flashlights, looking for the telltale phosph.o.r.escence of a particular wild mushroom. People grow things to his specifications. The simplest-looking garlic chip garnish at the French Laundry can require the skills of a microsurgeon. Maybe you've heard all that.

There was a break between courses a sort of seventh-inning stretch and there we were: four grown men three chefs and an author standing outside Keller's kitchen in the dark, our noses pressed up against the window screen, spying on the man, whispering.

'SSssshh! . . . He'll hear us!' somebody said.

'Look,' said Michael. 'See how happy he looks!'

'My G.o.d! He's got no mise mise at all!' said someone else. Standing there in the shadows in the French Laundry's garden, it felt like we were kids on Halloween night. at all!' said someone else. Standing there in the shadows in the French Laundry's garden, it felt like we were kids on Halloween night.

'That's a happy man,' agreed Eric.

'How many chefs get to do this?' Keller had said earlier. 'We're just really lucky. And I don't forget that.'

A twenty-course tasting menu, under the most favorable circ.u.mstances, is a challenge to any chef. A twenty-course (including amuse-gueules amuse-gueules) tasting menu for a party of fellow chefs is, for most of us, reasonable rationale for a nervous breakdown. But imagine try to imagine turning out four distinct and different twenty-course tasting menus for that one table of chefs, only two or three courses in common, over sixty different plates of food hitting one party of four and doing it at the same time as serving a full dining room of regulars, many of whom are also having elaborate multicoursed tasting menus and you get the idea when I say that Thomas Keller is different.

The meal took six and a half hours, with very little, if any, waiting between courses. Four different little oyster dishes would arrive, and we would all first look at our own plate, then glance longingly at the others'. For a while, we'd taste a little, sawing off a tiny bite of oyster, for instance, then pa.s.s our plates counterclockwise so the others could try. After many bottles of wine, and many courses, some of us just stopped pa.s.sing. How do you cut a single oyster into four portions? It's hard. Some get more than others. In the highly charged atmosphere where everybody wants to try everything, this can lead to disputes maybe violence. By the time the meat and fowl began hitting the table, I just hunched over my plate and said, 'Don't even think about it. You can try this one next time.'

There was a lot of head shaking and sighing going on. Who among us in the whole wide world of chefs would attempt this? It was, far and away, the most impressive restaurant meal I'd ever had. Let me give you a closer look. Listed below is the menu for that evening, what I was served. Keep in mind that Scott, Eric and Michael were simultaneously enjoying equally elaborate and yet different dishes.

The meal began with the French Laundry's signature amuse amuse tiny little coronets of salmon tartare, served in a cone rack like at Baskin-Robbins (the inspiration for the dish). We all knew they were coming. We'd seen them in the cookbook in my guests' case, they'd had them before. In addition to being delicious, it's psychological manipulation at its most skillful. You can't help but be charmed. The cute little cones, wrapped in tiny paper napkins, press long disused b.u.t.tons in the sense-memory section of the brain. You feel like a kid again, your appet.i.te jump-starts, and a breathless sense of antic.i.p.ation comes over you. You want you need to know: What's next? Here's what I had next: puree of Robinson Ranch shallot soup with glazed shallots, English cuc.u.mber sorbet with pickled cuc.u.mber and a dill-weed tiny little coronets of salmon tartare, served in a cone rack like at Baskin-Robbins (the inspiration for the dish). We all knew they were coming. We'd seen them in the cookbook in my guests' case, they'd had them before. In addition to being delicious, it's psychological manipulation at its most skillful. You can't help but be charmed. The cute little cones, wrapped in tiny paper napkins, press long disused b.u.t.tons in the sense-memory section of the brain. You feel like a kid again, your appet.i.te jump-starts, and a breathless sense of antic.i.p.ation comes over you. You want you need to know: What's next? Here's what I had next: puree of Robinson Ranch shallot soup with glazed shallots, English cuc.u.mber sorbet with pickled cuc.u.mber and a dill-weed tuile tuile, Yukon Gold potato blini blini with s.h.i.+take mushrooms and chive b.u.t.ter, cauliflower with s.h.i.+take mushrooms and chive b.u.t.ter, cauliflower panna cotta panna cotta with Malpeque oyster glaze and osetra caviar, with Malpeque oyster glaze and osetra caviar, cote de saumon cote de saumon, an Atlantic salmon chop with russet potato gnocchi gnocchi and Perigord truffles. Salmon chop? you're thinking. Salmon ain't got no chops! Yes, they do. Up by the head, there's an oft-neglected triangle of delicious flesh. It's a tricky little piece, usually discarded when chefs cut salmon for uniform portions of filet, because it's an awkward shape and riddled with annoying little bones. At the Laundry, a liability has been turned into an a.s.set. There it was on my plate, a perfect little and Perigord truffles. Salmon chop? you're thinking. Salmon ain't got no chops! Yes, they do. Up by the head, there's an oft-neglected triangle of delicious flesh. It's a tricky little piece, usually discarded when chefs cut salmon for uniform portions of filet, because it's an awkward shape and riddled with annoying little bones. At the Laundry, a liability has been turned into an a.s.set. There it was on my plate, a perfect little cote de saumon cote de saumon, looking just like a baby lamb chop, one bone extending from a tiny medallion of fish. Sounds cute? It is. A lot of Keller's dishes reveal an abiding sense of whimsy.

Whimsy and its unlovely cousin, irony, make appearances on a lot of menus these days, more often than not, unsuccessfully. You'll see a menu item with a 'cute' transposition of terms for instance, 'tournedos of monkfish,' which means nothing more than that the chef is bored with the word medallions medallions or feels insecure about t.i.tling his creation 'little pieces of monkfish.' Rarely does the finished product bear any resemblance to the term in its original usage. Now, if you were to serve that little disk of monkfish, larded with bacon, topped with a slab of foie gras, and drizzled with truffled or feels insecure about t.i.tling his creation 'little pieces of monkfish.' Rarely does the finished product bear any resemblance to the term in its original usage. Now, if you were to serve that little disk of monkfish, larded with bacon, topped with a slab of foie gras, and drizzled with truffled demiglace demiglace, you might be able to get away with calling it 'tournedos of monkfish Rossini' a direct reference to the old beef cla.s.sic. But why? It's a dangerous game playing with your food like that. The line between cute and cloying (or worse pretentious) is a very fine one.

But Keller, typically, is playing at something else here. He's not looking to elevate a less than worthy dish by a.s.sociating it with a beloved cla.s.sic. More often than not, he's taking something refined and giving it an ordinary even cliched name (the best examples being his famous 'coffee and doughnuts' dessert, his 'Caesar salad,' and his 'grilled cheese sandwich.' 'The one compliment,' explains Keller, 'that I enjoy the most is someone saying, "This reminds me of" and they'll tell you of this wonderful experience they had somewhere else. And I hope that when they go someplace else, they'll say, "This reminds me of the French Laundry." ' Memory that's a powerful tool in any chef's kit. Used skillfully, it can be devastatingly effective. I don't know of any other chef who can pull it off so successfully. When you're eating a four-star meal in one of the world's best restaurants, and tiny, almost subliminal suggestions keep drawing you back to the grilled cheese sandwiches mom used to make you on rainy days, your first trip to Baskin-Robbins, or the first bra.s.serie meal you had in France, you can't help even the most cynical among us but be charmed and lulled into a state of blissful submission. It's good enough when a dish somehow reminds you of a cherished moment, a fondly remembered taste from years past. When those expectations and preconceptions are then routinely exceeded, you find yourself happily surprised. Keller had a surprise for me.

He'd done his homework, I guess, gleaning from my book that I'm an absolutely degenerate smoker. There is no smoking at the French Laundry maybe the only place on earth I don't mind refraining. But, to be honest, by course number five I was feeling a slight need. To my embarra.s.sment and delight, they had antic.i.p.ated this in the kitchen. When the next courses arrived, mine was called 'coffee and a cigarette': Marlboro-infused coffee custard (with foie gras). My dinner companions hooted. I blushed down to my socks, thinking this a cruel but very funny joke at my expense. I certainly didn't expect the thing to taste good. G.o.dd.a.m.n the man, it was good. (He'd actually used the tobacco from a very decent cigar, he told me later.) Best of all, after I'd polished off my plate, I felt a very welcome, much-needed nicotine buzz.

Next?

Une salade fraiche au truffe noire Une salade fraiche au truffe noire with celery branch and celery root vinaigrette. Hand-cut tagliatelle with Perigord truffles and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. (The truffles were shaved tableside from a magnificent fist-sized monster.) Herb-roasted Chatham Bay cod 'shank' with a 'frica.s.see' of new-crop potatoes and applewood-smoked bacon emulsion. (Again, a liability turned into an a.s.set, as the small, usually unservable tail section of fish had been cut across the bone and served like a lamb shank.) 'Lobster Navarin,' sweet b.u.t.ter-poached Maine lobster with glazed pearl onions, spring vegetables, and sauce 'Navarin' (another crosscultural reference 'Navarin' is usually a.s.sociated with a heavy, old-school French country cla.s.sic of braised lamb shoulder). Brioche-crusted 'confit' of North American moulard duck 'foie gras' with braised fennel, fennel salad, and Tellicherry pepper. ' with celery branch and celery root vinaigrette. Hand-cut tagliatelle with Perigord truffles and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. (The truffles were shaved tableside from a magnificent fist-sized monster.) Herb-roasted Chatham Bay cod 'shank' with a 'frica.s.see' of new-crop potatoes and applewood-smoked bacon emulsion. (Again, a liability turned into an a.s.set, as the small, usually unservable tail section of fish had been cut across the bone and served like a lamb shank.) 'Lobster Navarin,' sweet b.u.t.ter-poached Maine lobster with glazed pearl onions, spring vegetables, and sauce 'Navarin' (another crosscultural reference 'Navarin' is usually a.s.sociated with a heavy, old-school French country cla.s.sic of braised lamb shoulder). Brioche-crusted 'confit' of North American moulard duck 'foie gras' with braised fennel, fennel salad, and Tellicherry pepper. 'Gastrique' milk-poached four-story Hills Farm 'poularde au lait' with 'creme fraiche' dumplings and 'bouquetire' of spring vegetables. Roasted Bellwether Farms spring lamb with a 'ca.s.soulet' of spring pole beans and thyme-infused extra virgin olive oil. (These were the most fetching, tender little lamb chops I'd ever encountered.) 'Roquefort' ricotta cheese 'gnocchi' with a Darjeeling tea-walnut oil emulsion, shaved walnuts, and grated Roquefort cheese. Hayden mango soup 'et son brunoise' (I love the 'et son brunoise' thing very funny). Haas avocado salad with Persian lime sorbet (of all the plates that made their way round our table that night, this was the only one that landed with a thud. Scott's comment was, 'This is waaay over my head. But then, I'm not that smart.') 'Coffee and doughnuts' cinnamon-sugared doughnuts with cappuccino semi-freddo (looking exactly like a coffee shop doughnut sitting next to a Chock Full O'Nuts cup filled with cappuccino, but marvelous). ' (looking exactly like a coffee shop doughnut sitting next to a Chock Full O'Nuts cup filled with cappuccino, but marvelous). 'Mille-feuille a la creme de vanille et son confit d'ananas mignardise mignardise.'

It was an absolutely awe-inspiring meal, accompanied, I should point out, by a procession of sensational wines. Unfortunately, I'm the wrong guy to be talking about wine. All I can tell you is that Scott, who knows about these things, used the word wow wow a lot. I remember a big brawny red in a cistern-sized gla.s.s, which nearly made me weep with pleasure. Cooking had crossed the line into magic. a lot. I remember a big brawny red in a cistern-sized gla.s.s, which nearly made me weep with pleasure. Cooking had crossed the line into magic.

Keller himself is quiet, with a bone-dry, gently sardonic sense of humor and the wary, observant gaze of a totally centered chef who knows what he wants to do and is doing it every day.

He seemed annoyed when asked about the roots of his drive for perfection. 'Perfect is something you never actually attain,' he said. 'It's something you search for. Once you reach it, it's not perfect. You've lost it. It's gone.'

Gush too much about 'creativity' and you'll get: 'There's very little creativity in anything.'

But instead of I I, me me, and my my, he uses words like respect respect, hope hope, inst.i.tution inst.i.tution, future future. Big words and big concepts in a trade where most of us look no further down the road than the next star, the next book deal, the next investor, the next busy Sat.u.r.day night.

I was going to go on. I was going to blather on about the seamless integration of restaurant and locale. I planned to ruminate on the marvelousness of a chef finding, after years of wandering and false starts, a home. I was in love with the idea that a chef of Keller's unique abilities and ambition could actually be content in a small town in wine country, marrying place, purveyors, personnel, and personal vision into an idyllic rural retreat, far from the carnivorous environs of the big city. The whole concept had great appeal to me. An ideal accomplished, if not by me, then at least by someone I liked and admired.

Then I opened up the New York Times New York Times and saw that Keller is planning a French Laundry in New York, that he's moving in across the street from Jean-Georges, down a ways from Duca.s.se, and realized I'd learned nothing at all. and saw that Keller is planning a French Laundry in New York, that he's moving in across the street from Jean-Georges, down a ways from Duca.s.se, and realized I'd learned nothing at all.

'Unfinished business in New York,' said my chef buddies as we sat around a table at a Lower East Side joint.

'Rakel didn't make it,' said one friend, regarding Keller's failed venture in Manhattan many years ago. 'It was great but the people weren't ready for it.'

'Jesus,' I sputtered, 'Keller coming to New York . . . That's an act of aggression! That's like Wyatt Earp coming to town. Everybody's gonna be gunning for him. Who wants that kind of pressure? He's already got it all. New Yorkers go to him! Why come here and have to put up with all the nonsense?'

Needless to say, when the new place opens its doors, every chef, critic, food writer, serious eater, and casual foodie in the city will have been hyperventilating for weeks. To say the restaurant will be 'eagerly antic.i.p.ated' would be an egregious understatement. I cannot even imagine what will happen. I'm afraid. I'm afraid he'll fail (if that should happen, it would be for reasons having nothing to do with food, of course). But more, I'm afraid he'll succeed. I like the idea of having to travel to experience a French Laundry meal. The journey is part of the experience or was for me an expression of the seriousness of one's intent, and the otherness of everything Keller. I liked looking out the window and seeing hills and countryside. I don't know if I want to be able just to pick up the phone, make a reservation, and, sooner or later, simply hop in a cab and zip down to Columbus Circle. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca. That experience, like the French Laundry, should be a pilgrimage. Not that that will slow me down in the slightest when the new place opens its doors. See you there.

Haggis Rules

'We're number two-behind Tonga,' said Simon, talking about Scotland's position on the scoreboard recording the incidence of heart disease worldwide. 'We've got to get that sorted out. Where is Tonga anyway? I've got to go there!'

The Scottish, Simon tells me, will deep-fry anything. To prove his point, he was taking me to a chip shop for some 'suppers.' We were decidedly not in Edinburgh. 'Too European . . . too . . . English,' sneered Simon. They put brown sauce on their fish and chips there, Simon revealed, an outraged look on his face just from remembering the brown home-brewed Kitchen Bouquet or GravyMaster concoction.

'Brown sauce on fish and chips? No, no, no, no, no,' said Simon. It's malt vinegar all the way, and plenty of salt for Simon, a proud Glaswegian with a typically sardonic sense of humor. He'd been feeding me Guinness all day and showing me around Glasgow, and now it was time, he said, to visit a proper 'chippie.' We ate the traditional fish and chips first, a batter-dipped and deep-fried filet of cod or more and more frequently, now that the cod population is in decline, haddock usually served in either a paper cone or a plastic to-go container. 'You got to get a good bit of salt on it,' said Simon, following a very healthy sprinkling with a long squirt of malt vinegar. 'I could eat b.l.o.o.d.y Elvis if you put enough vinegar on him . . . S' magic.' The fish was great, the chips, as everywhere in the UK, were needlessly substandard, limp and soggy. Few chip shop owners bother to blanch their fries in low-temperature oil before frying, so they are never, ever crisp. The appropriate beverage for this kind of on-the-run Glaswegian repast, said Simon gravely, is Irn-Bru, the popular caffeine-jacked orange-tinted soft drink.

We were not really here to do the fish and chip thing. The real wonders, the full potential of the Scottish chip shop, lay somewhere deeper: deep-fried haggis with curry sauce. The crispy cigar-shaped tube of sheep guts and oatmeal (more on that later) was wonderful the perfect late-night munchie food after a long session drinking Red Bull and vodka, pints of heavy, or Buckfast (a cheap screw-top wine: the Ripple of Scotland). The 'king rib' whatever that might be was delicious, though its actual relations.h.i.+p to ribs seemed in doubt. Prefried orders of haggis, meat pies, sausages, and fish filets were crowded next to one another under bulb-lighted gla.s.s, ready to be snapped up by hungry drinkers.

Everything, everything at the chip shop, went into the same hot oil. Carlo, the counterman, unwrapped a Mars bar, dunked it in the universal batter, and dropped it into the oil. When it floated, golden brown, on the surface, he removed it, sprinkled a little powdered sugar on it, and handed it over.

'Careful,' said Simon. 'Inside, it's b.l.o.o.d.y napalm.'

Mmmm. I like grease. I like chocolate. And I like sugar. After addressing any concerns about potential mandibular or maxillary facial damage by allowing the thing to cool down a bit, Simon sawed off a half and presented it to me. It was still tongue-searingly hot and not bad at all. Simon flashed me an evil smile and enjoyed telling me what was next. 'Deep-fried pizza?' I said, 'Oh . . . I don't know . . . That's maybe . . . I don't know, it seems somehow . . . unnatural.' I had a hard time believing that anyone would even consider such an atrocity. Sure enough, Carlo took a cold slice of premade frozen pizza, dipped it cheese side down into the batter, and dropped it into the all-purpose trough of grease.

'Not bad,' I said.

'Wait a minute,' said Simon as I made to leave. 'There's this one thingy we have to try.' He told a skeptical-looking Carlo to drop a pickled egg into the batter. We were breaking new culinary ground.

'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't . . . know about this.'

'This is where my granny would go "Holy Mary, mother of G.o.d,"' said Simon, taking a bite and handing me the rest. It was edible. I think one's enjoyment of the chip shop's more esoteric delights has a direct relations.h.i.+p to the amount of alcohol consumed prior to eating. Hot, salty, crunchy, and portable, the previously awful-sounding collection of greasy delights can become a Garden of Eden of heart-clogging goodness when you're in a drunken stupor, hungering for fried snacks. At that precise moment, nothing could taste better.

Glasgow has a working-cla.s.s vibe and the familiar feel of parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx. In many ways, it's the antidote to everywhere else in the world, a city filled with gruff, no-bulls.h.i.+t, often very funny citizens with impenetrable but beautiful accents. On my way into town on the train, I fell asleep near a large group of Glaswegian football fans. When I woke, for a few disconcerting minutes, I thought, listening to the people talking and shouting around me, that I'd somehow stayed on the train too long, maybe slipped across the sea to Lithuania or Latvia or Finland. Only the repeated exclamations of 'f.o.o.k!' and 's.h.i.+te' brought me back to the correct time and place. (Note to travelers: Your choice of football team is an important one in Glasgow. Generally speaking, it's a Catholic versus Protestant thing, I think. Aligning yourself with one team over the other is a 'once in, never out' lifelong commitment. They take their footie seriously around these parts. It's a good idea to sound out one's friends carefully before saying what might well be the wrong thing.) Edinburgh is, in my opinion, one of the most strikingly beautiful cities in the world. There's a castle sitting on top of a big rock promontory right in the middle of town. The place drips with history, a crowded tangle of cobblestone streets, ancient buildings, beautiful monuments, none of which weigh the town down. It's got good pubs, and bright, shrewd, very sophisticated, and often lavishly educated folks. I love it there (though I feel more at home in Glasgow).

This is mean of me, because I'm not going to give you its name and I'm certainly not gonna tell you where it is or next time I go, there'll be a bunch of 'b.l.o.o.d.y Yanks' at the bar but a friend of mine took me to his local awhile back, on a narrow cobblestone street in Edinburgh. My friend writes very fine novels set in the city, and his fictional hero, a mildly alcoholic civil servant, hangs out at this very real pub in between murders. If there is a perfect place in the world to drink beer, this is it. It's a modest, una.s.suming corner pub with a small sign and smoked windows. One can't see the interior from the street. Just inside the door are an ancient small bar, weathered wood floors, hand-pumped beers and ales, a few middle-aged geezers drinking pints and chatting with the bartender. In a back room, there are a few tables and an electric fire in the hearth, some fading football posters on the walls. It is a place of perfect stillness and calm, the first sip of ale inspiring feelings of near-transcendental serenity. This was it, the perfect refuge from the modern world, and all its worries. Within moments of hanging my coat on a well-worn hook and sitting down, I turned to my friend and said, 'I'm never leaving.' I know it's terribly unfair of me to be so coy about the place. But don't worry, Scotland is loaded with great pubs and I'm sure I'm overromanticizing. I do that a lot.

For Simon, it's love/hate with Edinburgh. He was not happy that I'd be having my first real haggis experience there. But he'd found us a very decent place on Edinburgh's High Street, just down from the castle, and he a.s.sured me that even though we were in (to his mind) the second-best city, the chef here knew what he was doing.

What is haggis, anyway? For one thing, it's the punch line to a thousand jokes in America. The Thing Never to Be Eaten Under Any Circ.u.mstances . . . What Groundskeeper Willie eats . . . It does sound terrifying to the uninitiated: a hot gooey mix of sheep's 'pluck' (the whole esophagus, lungs, liver, and heart, yanked out in one go, then finely ground), oatmeal, onions, and black pepper. This filling is cooked inside a sheep's stomach (which you don't eat) and then steamed slowly, covered in the oven, then served with 'neeps and tatties' mashed turnip and potato. As with so many dishes, it originated with the leftovers of the rich landowners turned into a proud cla.s.sic by an enterprising and desperate peasantry.

A kilted bagpiper's performance preceded the arrival of dinner. (With his graying handlebar mustache, he looked suspiciously like the original 'Leather Guy' in the Village People.) Another few seconds of screeching pipes and I'd be reaching into my pocket for a hundred-pound note just to make him go away. I may love Scotland, but the sound of bagpipes is as alluring as a dentist's drill hitting nerve. Fortunately, our haggis soon arrived, a big plump flesh-colored steaming balloon, tied at both ends and rupturing slightly in the middle, ground meat and oat mixture spilling out like a slowly erupting volcano. As I quietly struggled for words to describe its somehow violent-looking appearance, the fully costumed piper did me one better, yanking a sharp, menacing-looking dirk out of his scabbard, approaching the near-to-bursting membrane, and swinging right in to Robert Burns's 'Address to the Haggis.' I couldn't follow too many of the words, though I did catch the phrases 'gus.h.i.+ng entrails' and 'a wondrous, glorious sack,' and then the piper slit the stomach fully open with his blade and retreated, leaving us to enjoy our guts.

After one mouthful, I couldn't disagree with Scotland's greatest poet. It was glorious. Haggis rules! Peppery, hot, meaty it didn't taste of anything you might expect in a dish cooked in stomach. Not really tasting organlike at all, no bitter livery taste, no chewy mysterious bits, no wet-dog taste of tripe. It was in no way offensive to even the most pedestrian American tastes, but subtle and rich in a boudin noir boudin noir sort of a way. If you can handle sort of a way. If you can handle boudin noir boudin noir or black pudding, or even sauteed calf's liver, you will love haggis. The mashed tatties and neeps provided a perfect counter to the hearty, peppery, oniony, oat flavor. The shepherd's pie in your old high school cafeteria was far more challenging to the palate. If haggis, right out of the oven, didn't look the way it did, we might all be eating it in America. They'd be serving it from street stands in New York, fried and battered with curry sauce. High-end restaurants would be making 'haggis sauce' and ' or black pudding, or even sauteed calf's liver, you will love haggis. The mashed tatties and neeps provided a perfect counter to the hearty, peppery, oniony, oat flavor. The shepherd's pie in your old high school cafeteria was far more challenging to the palate. If haggis, right out of the oven, didn't look the way it did, we might all be eating it in America. They'd be serving it from street stands in New York, fried and battered with curry sauce. High-end restaurants would be making 'haggis sauce' and 'feuillete of baby bok choy, Yukon Gold potato, and haggis with a whiskey sauce,' and stuffing it into metal rings, decorating it with squeeze-bottle designs. of baby bok choy, Yukon Gold potato, and haggis with a whiskey sauce,' and stuffing it into metal rings, decorating it with squeeze-bottle designs.

Scotland has far more to offer hungry pilgrims than grease and guts, however delightful they might be. The Scottish are going through the same foodie gold rush as elsewhere in the UK and Ireland (and Australia) and, as elsewhere, they are rediscovering what was good all along about their country. The seafood is unbelievable. In Leith, the old waterfront on the firth outside Edinburgh, there are a number of modest-looking seafood joints serving absolutely smas.h.i.+ngly good scallops, salmon, mussels, trout, oysters, and other fish from the North Sea, the Atlantic, and Scotland's many rivers, lochs, and streams. At the most ramshackle, touristy-looking seafood barn, where you'd expect, at best, to get a decent piece of deep-fried or plain broiled fish, they're piling tasty little stacks of fresh fish on piles of tasty indigenous vegetables the technique as good as almost anywhere in New York or London, and the raw ingredients frequently better.

Scottish beef is justifiably famous. And Scottish game venison, grouse, pheasant, wild hare, and rabbit is perhaps the best in the world. I capped off my Scottish wanderings outside of Inverness, in the Highlands, on the 25,000-acre estate of the Cawdor family. For a guy like me, it's hard to fathom how the rich and the upper cla.s.ses really live especially when you're talking about the UK. For Americans, the aristocracy means any talented hustler who's got more than four cars and a beachfront pile in the Hamptons. In Scotland, I found out, it means something very, very different. The rich talk differently. They all seem to know one another. And in the case of the Cawdors, and Colin, the seventh earl of Cawdor, they tend to go back a ways. His family have been living on this particular Rhode Island-sized expanse of grouse moors, salmon streams, farmland, and forest since the late thirteenth century. There's a castle in the middle, a structure referred to significantly, if inaccurately, as the residence of 'Macbeth, the soon-to-be thane of Cawdor.' The Cawdors were kind enough to let me stay at their Drynachan Lodge, a hunting, shooting, and fis.h.i.+ng retreat on their property, where I'd come to eat wild salmon and to try, halfheartedly at first, to kill a helpless little bunny rabbit or two.

Things really were different here. I don't know any rich people in America who count among their employees not just cooks and servers and housekeepers but also gamekeepers and foresters. I don't know any wealthy American families that can point to a magnificent forest of tall trees and deep gorges and rus.h.i.+ng freshwater streams and say, 'My great-great-great-great grandfather planted that forest.' It was breathtakingly beautiful. From my big bra.s.s bed, I could see mile after mile of checkerboard-patterned grouse moor, the scrub and heather burned down in carefully controlled alternating square sections to provide optimum living conditions for the much-sought-after grouse. Pheasants wandered carefree just outside my door. Roe deer kept the underbrush to a minimum in the thick forest. Wild salmon literally leapt from crystal-clear streams. For mile after mile, an entire interlocking ecosystem was maintained and had been maintained for hundreds of years on the sprawling, seemingly never-ending grounds running all the way to the sea. Roddy, the gamekeeper, took me salmon fis.h.i.+ng, and he showed me, as best he could, how to cast a line. I reeled it in across fewer than two feet of quick-moving water, hoping that a salmon would become enticed by the fly. The salmon were jumping out of the water, looking me right in the eye only a few feet away, but proved immune to temptation. Nothing like being proven again and again to be more stupid than a fish. But I didn't care. To stand at the edge of a Highland stream, casting across the water, reeling in, then moving slowly downstream on a brisk, clean, late-spring morning, had a hypnotic effect. I didn't mind if I caught anything or not. Fortunately, Ruth, the chef at the lodge, had a good supply of wild salmon on hand, so I wouldn't miss eating some.

I'd agreed once again for purposes of television entertainment to go rabbit shooting with Roddy. The plan was to bag a few rabbits, take them back to Ruth at the lodge, and have her make us a traditional poacher's stew of rabbit, venison, and cabbage, cooked in red wine and stock. Though by now I was reasonably comfortable firing automatic and semiautomatic rifles, handguns, and grenade launchers, given my Cambodian adventures, I had never in my life fired a shotgun. Nor had I ever fired a weapon at a living, breathing, fast-moving target. I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine. Still, I only agreed to take part in the senseless hunt because I was certain that I'd be hopelessly inept at shooting any rabbits, that I was sure to come up empty. I counted on Roddy, the seasoned professional, to provide enough bunny rabbits for the following day's lunch.

I don't know what happened. With my shotgun broken over my arm so as not to shoot any of the TV crew or gamekeepers should I stumble into a pothole on the rough terrain and the safety on, I spied a rabbit racing for cover about sixty to eighty feet in front of me. I quickly had to snap the gun closed, raise it, click off the safety, aim, and then fire all this at a speedy, barely visible little critter that was running and leaping across his own turf. Bam! Bam! Very little kick. To my shock and no small amount of dismay, I'd blown the spine out of something that had once looked very much like Bugs. Very little kick. To my shock and no small amount of dismay, I'd blown the spine out of something that had once looked very much like Bugs.

'Well shot, sir,' said an a.s.sistant gamekeeper, retrieving the limp, still-warm corpse. Holding my prey, I couldn't resist the need to pet it, so cuddly and adorable; my voice actually cracked a little when I talked to the camera.

After each shot, I'd break my smoking weapon and an a.s.sistant would remove the sh.e.l.l and replace it. I saw a movement to my left, swung the barrel around, rapping Chris's camera in the process, and bagged another one tearing along a wall a long ways off. Jesus! I was a murder machine! Now I had two sweet-faced little bunny wabbits on my conscience . . . This was not right. But, G.o.d help me, I was having fun. Another few hours and I'd be signing up for grouse season.

Back at the lodge, Ruth prepared an amazing packed lunch of rabbit and venison stew, nettle soup, slices of air-dried beef, Scottish cheeses, and homemade breads. Then all of us, Chef Ruth, Gloria, the mad and wonderful Glaswegian housekeeper, an a.s.sistant gamekeeper, and the crew headed out over the moors to a fis.h.i.+ng shack by the edge of a stream. Ruth set up a buffet on a picnic table inside and we helped ourselves, then sat down on the porch and devoured the fruits of the not-so-great white hunter's toil.