Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [124]
Things worked out well. I was soon slurping happily away at a big, steaming bowl of noodles, pork, rice and pickles. This method of ordering would become my modus operandi over the following days and nights. I can tell you that I felt a lot better about myself after my breakfast. I spent a few hours at the restaurant before hailing a cab for Chiyoda-ku district. I had an engagement.
If you didn't already know, a few years back I wrote a satirical thriller policier, set, predictably, in the restaurant business. Based loosely on my experiences at Work Progress and with the 'Italian fraternal organization' I mentioned earlier, it was acquired for translation by the eminent Japanese publishing house, Hayakawa. Being the hustler that I am, upon learning I was headed for Tokyo I immediately contacted my Japanese publisher, volunteering, a bit disingenuously, to do 'anything I could' to help promote the book over there. I don't know how nice or how welcome a thing to do it was. The book had been out for a while - and clearly had not set the world on fire. David Hasselhoff might have hit it big over there; Airwolf reruns were once huge on the Pacific Rim; but my little book had not, I think, caused my publishers to send for me to satisfy public demand for a closer look. What a responsibility, I now realized, what a situation I had saddled Hayakawa with, giving them an alarmingone week's notice of my arrival.
However horrified they might privately have been, they responded with enormous tact and hospitality. An event was organized. A reception committee was formed. Cars were laid on. Lunches arranged. Copies of my book were found and quickly displayed in the ground-floor bookstore of their corporate offices. So, I found myself headed off to the Chiyoda-ku district to meet the chef of La Riviere, a restaurant adjacent to and owned by my publisher. I was to cook a meal evocative of my earlier work of fiction for the benefit of the press, provide a few bons most at a press conference, appear on Japanese cable TV (network also owned by my publisher) and in every way cause inconvenience to strangers who had been nothing but generous to me from afar.
The chef of La Riviere, Suzuki-san, must have been thrilled to have me show up in his kitchen. Bad enough, some big, hairy gaijin was getting rammed down his throat, making use of his staff, rummaging through his reach-ins - but I was cooking Italian. The menu for the event was minestra toscana, followed by a paillard of veal with roasted red pepper coulis and basil oil, and a salad of arugula, endive and radicchio. Chef Suzuki was polite, as I was ushered into his kitchen with the requisite bowing and greeting. He was helpful and polite in every way, as was his crew. But he must have been simmering with rage and disgust. Suzuki-san and I communicated through a translator and gestures, my gift of a Yankee World Series Champs baseball cap going only a short way to ameliorating the chef's molar-grinding distaste for what I was about to do to his kitchen. My simple Italian lunch, re-creating a home-cooked meal prepared by a gangster character in the book, must have looked to the chef like roadkill. And the portions! I thought I'd scaled them down nicely, but after serving the meal to a roomful of bowing, chainsmokingvand very genial Hayakawa executives and a few press-ganged members of the fourth estate, I found myself repeatedly asked, 'Bourdainsan, the portions at Les Halles, how many grams of meat in each order?' When I replied, the reaction was giggling and head-shaking - an indication, I came to believe, of abject terror. The prospect