A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [141]
Overall, though, not a bad meal. And I’ve eaten the still-beating heart of a fucking cobra! (I’ll be dining out on this story for a while.) For the very first time after eating food that will ‘make me strong,’ I actually feel something. I don’t know if it’s just nervous energy and adrenaline, but when I walk out into the street, I feel a buzz, a jangly, happy, vibrating sense of well-being. I think, Yes, I believe I do feel . . . strong.
‘Monsieur Fowlair. Monsieur Fow-lairr . . .’ someone is whispering.
It’s the police inspector in Greene’s The Quiet American, talking in my dreams. I wake up expecting to see Phuong, the heroine of the novel, preparing an opium pipe for me, and Pyle, the youthful CIA agent, petting his dog in a chair. I’m in my room at the Continental, carved fleurs-de-lis in the woodwork, ornate chairs, yards of intricately carved shelving. I can hear the clack-clacking of shoes on the wide marble floor outside the door, the sound echoing through the halls. Saigon. Still only in Saigon. The French doors leading onto the balcony are open and, though early, the streets are already filling up with cyclos, bicycles, motorbikes, and scooters. Women crouch in doorways, eating bowls of pho. A man fixes a motorbike on the sidewalk. Buses cough and stall and start again. At Givral’s, across the street, they’re lining up for coffee and the short, plump, fragrant-smelling baguettes. Soon, the ‘noodle knockers’ will come, rapping their mallets to announce the imminent arrival of another yoke-borne kitchen, bowls and bowls of steaming fresh noodles. Linh has informed me of something called ‘fox’ coffee, ca-phe-chon, a brew made from the tenderest beans, fed to a fox (though I have since seen it referred to as a weasel), and the beans later recovered from the animal’s stool, washed (presumably), roasted, and ground. Sounds good to me.
I’m leaving Vietnam soon, and yet I’m yearning for it already. I grab a stack of damp dong off my nightstand, get dressed, and head for the market. There’s a lot I haven’t tried.
I’m still here, I tell myself.
I’m still here.
Perfect
The whole concept of the ‘perfect meal’ is ludicrous.
‘Perfect,’ like ‘happy,’ tends to sneak up on you. Once you find it – like Thomas Keller says – it’s gone. It’s a fleeting thing, ‘perfect,’ and, if you’re anything like me, it’s often better in retrospect. When you’re shivering under four blankets in a Moroccan hotel room, the perfect meal can be something no more exotic than breakfast at Barney Greengrass back in New York – the one you had four months ago. Your last Papaya King hot dog takes on golden, even mythic, proportions when remembered from a distance.
I’m writing this, these words, from a beach chair somewhere in the French West Indies. My hand is actually scrawling in wet black ink across a yellow legal pad. I’m not here to eat. I’m here to write, and relax, untroubled by phone calls, shoes and socks, visitors, E-mails, or obligations of any kind. I’m here because I’ve been on the road for over a year and I want desperately to stay put, to dig in, to remain in one place and maybe reacquaint myself with my wife.
I’ve been coming to this beach for a long time. The first time I visited, back in the eighties, I was still kicking dope, and the blood-warm water felt cold on my skin. My wife and I honeymooned here, blowing every cent of wedding loot on a two-week kamikaze vacation, which left us tanned, happy, totally in love with the island – and utterly broke. Down here, I like to think that I’m not the brutish, obsessive, blustering blowhard