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By Root 651 0

– almost obscenely good. Like all my favorite haute chefs, the Arzaks don’t mess about with the extraneous or nonsensical. Presentations represented the food to best effect and never distracted from the ingredients. The Basque elements were always front and center; you knew, at all times, where you were. There was crayfish with eggplant caviar, olive oil, and parsley, and then an alarmingly shrewd yet deceptively simple creation I’d never seen nor even heard of before: a fresh duck egg, whole, yolk and white undisturbed, which had been removed carefully from the shell, wrapped in plastic with truffle oil and duck fat, then lightly, delicately poached before being unwrapped and presented, topped with wild-mushroom duxelles and a dusting of dried sausage. It was one of those dishes that, while absolutely eye-opening and delicious, inevitably makes me feel small, wondering why I could never have come up with such a concept. Eating it was bittersweet, the experience tinged as it was with the certain knowledge of my own bad choices and shortcomings. How did they come up with this? Did the idea appear like the theory of relativity appeared to Einstein – in dreams? What came first? The egg? The duck fat? It was so good. It hurt to eat it.

The menu kept coming. A vegetable tart with chestnuts, white asparagus, baby bok choy, and wild mushrooms; sea bass with a sauce of leek ash, a green sauce of fresh herbs, and garnish of one flawless diver’s scallop; wild duck, roasted in its own juices, the defiantly fat-flecked jus allowed to run unmolested around the plate; a duck consommé with roasted tomato. It was one of the best meals I’d ever had. In one of those ‘It can’t get any better than this’ moments, an ashtray appeared, allowing me to enjoy a postmeal cigarette inside a three-star kitchen. Life was good.

Listening to Luis Irizar and Juan Mari Arzak discuss cuisine, the things they’d accomplished, was like listening to two old Bolsheviks reminisce about storming the Winter Palace. I envied them that they were so good at what they did, that they were so firmly grounded in a culture, a place, an ethnoculinary tradition, that they were surrounded by such limitless supplies of good stuff – and the clientele to appreciate it fully. Would such advantages have, in my time, changed my own trajectory? Made me a better chef? A better cook?

As another American writing about Spain famously said, ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’

How to Drink Vodka

Wrapped up against the cold in the small outer entryway of the midnight train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, I watched the faint shaking of the silver samovar of hot tea and hand-wrought silver cup holders and glasses at the end of the first-class carriage. Snow collected in narrow drifts on the floor and around the window glass as I smoked.

It was February of the coldest, snowiest winter in Russia for a hundred years. Out there in the hinterlands of snowed-over farms and disused factories, people were dying in droves, heating oil was short, and President Putin was talking of arresting and indicting a few provincial governors who’d mishandled supply. In the news, an American graduate student had been detained for marijuana possession, the charges suddenly – and ominously – upgraded to espionage. A Russian colonel, charged with rape and murder, implicated directly by forensic evidence and the testimony of his fellow officers, was arguing for acquittal and garnering considerable support from the remnants of Commie hard-liners.

Outside the window of my snug sleeping compartment with its triple locks, mile after mile of birch forest, snow-covered farmland, and frozen lakes swept by, glimpsed for a second and then gone. So far, Russia had been everything I’d wanted it to be.

It was the Russia of my dreams and adolescent fantasies that I was looking for: dark, snowy, cold, a moody and romantic place of beauty, sadness, melancholy, and absurdity. In Moscow, the white-topped minarets and onion domes, the tall redbrick battlements of the Kremlin, the imperious, gloomy facades of GUM department