Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [122]
The city of Tokyo is an amazing sprawl - something out of William Gibson or Philip Dick - seeming to go on forever. The bus from the airport wound over bridges, down through tunnels, up fly-overs that wrapped around the upper floors of apartment and office buildings. I passed canals, industrial parks, factories, residential areas, business districts, carp ponds, austere temples, indoor ski slopes, rooftop driving ranges. As I got closer to my destination, it was getting dark, with giant, screaming video screens advertising beverages and cellphones and recording artists, garish signs in English and Japanese, lines of cars, crowds of people - row after row after row of them, surging through intersections in orderly fashion. This was not America or anyplace remotely like it. Things on the other side of the world were very, very different.
The bus unloaded at a hotel in Roppongi district, and a helpful dispatcher in a uniform hailed me a cab. The rear passenger door swung open for me, operated by the driver by lever, and I slid on to a clean, white slip-covered back seat. Dispatcher and driver examined the Les Halles business card with address, debating route and destination. When the matter was decided, the door swung closed and we were off. The driver wore white gloves.
Roppongi district is international in character - like an Asian Georgetown - and Les Halles Tokyo, located in the shadow of the Eiffel-like Tokyo Tower, and across the street from a pachinko parlor, looked much like its older brother in New York, though spanking new and impeccably, surgically clean. Les Halles New York is loved for its smoke-stained walls, creaky chairs, weathered wooden bar - the fact that it resembles what it is: a familiar, worn, old-school brasserie of the Parisian model. Les Halles Tokyo, on the other hand, though accurate to the model down to the tiniest design detail, was shiny and undamaged, and apparently kept that way.
It was a warm night when I arrived, and the French doors to the cafe were opened. Philippe saw me from the bar. He'd arrived a day earlier. He came out to greet me.
'Welcome to Tokyo, Chef,' he said.
I had been provided with an apartment nearby, and Philippe helped load my luggage on the handlebars of two borrowed bicycles for the short trip over. My first close-up look at Tokyo was from the seat of a rickety three-gear as I pedaled furiously to keep up with Philippe. He took off at a good pace down Roppongi's very crowded streets. You're supposed to ride on the sidewalks, I later learned, though I don't know how that's even possible. Traffic runs the wrong way over there, so heading straight into it, I picked and wove my way between cars and vans, dodging pedestrians, trying to keep my 50-pound duffel bag on the handlebars and not get dragged backwards off the seat by the other bag hanging around my neck. Roppongi Crossing, though by no means Tokyo's largest or busiest intersection, is where thousands of teenagers meet before heading off to the bars and clubs. The streets were unbelievably dense with pedestrians, people hanging around, flashing neon, flapping banners, more screaming signs, pimpy-looking young men in suits and patent leather shoes, surrounded by dye-blonde Asian women in thigh-high boots and micro-mini skirts. Philippe took a hard turn and we were heading down a hill, through twisting, narrow and decidedly quieter streets. Things became stranger and even more unfamiliar, the smell of something good to eat issuing from every building we passed.
The organization kept a few apartments in a kind of residential hotel. It looked like a hotel, felt like a hotel, but had no visible employees. Comfortable, spacious by my imagined Tokyo standards, and equipped