Posts from the ‘foodie pseudery’ Category

I have two kitchens. For most of the year, I cook in an Upper West Side apartment, in Manhattan. It was designed in the eighteen-nineties and is probably best described as a landlord’s misguided attempt to lure tenants with horizontal evocations of the upstairs-downstairs life. The ‘public’ rooms, meant to be seen and admired, were large and well proportioned. The ‘private’ rooms, out of sight off a long back hall, were for the most part awkward and cramped, and perhaps the lowliest room on this totem pole of domestic status was the kitchen, where your cook, emerging each morning through the door of a tiny bedroom—in my apartment, it opened between the icebox and the sink—was expected to spend her waking hours.

… there was no way to expand my kitchen to accommodate my own moment …

Soothed by its musky light, I’d discover a vividly perfumed circus that needled me with pleasure while letting me be invisible. If I loved the olive stalls, the chickpeas and fava beans, and the charcutier’s stand with its carnivore’s curtain of dangling brick red chorizos and its satanically handsome butcher, it was the fishmongers of this port city at the door between the cold Atlantic Ocean and the warm Mediterranean Sea that truly fascinated me. I could study their lavish and mysterious offerings for hours, and every day I’d come across a kind of fish I’d never seen before—science-fiction-strange goose barnacles, or scarlet scorpion fish. Though I didn’t know it at the time, slowly but surely, the market was healing me, a just-turned-30 writer living in Paris in the 1980s.

He looks at the menu. ‘It really irritates me when people don’t spend time looking at the menu. In France no one speaks until they have studied the menu. I can’t bear it when people talk before ordering.’ I ask him what he is looking for in a menu. ‘A balance of flavours. I want to be experimental but I also want to match the food up so that we have a full culinary experience.’ I tell him I am happy for him to order for me. He chooses the cuttlefish risotto, rabbit salad, mozzarella plate and a courgette salad and then photographs it on his mobile when it arrives. ‘I photograph everything I eat,’ he says.