Steak - Mark Schatzker [76]
The chef laid the steak on the grill and flipped it after seven and a half minutes. (I was the one timing the steak; the chef “sensed” when it was ready.) He sprinkled salt and pepper on the cooked side and, after several more minutes, pressed his finger into the crust to assess doneness. The bistecca was showing signs of becoming firmer, so the chef flipped it on its back, the rib pointing straight up, so that the steak could absorb heat through its broad bony base and send it radiating through to the meat above. Juice began to trickle out the bottom, flowing over the hot bone and hissing as it landed in the coals. The fire was so hot I couldn’t stand closer than four feet, and even then spent the rest of the night with my face radiating heat as though it was sunburned.
Being the elegant sort of place it is, Borgo San Felice saves its guests the labor of cutting bistecca. A waiter wheels over a table with a big cutting board on top and does it for you, using a long, curved butcher knife that would not look out of place on the wall at Antica Macelleria Falorni. Each strip of meat was a textbook example of the spectrum of beef doneness. The center was red and barely above room temperature, the exterior was nearly black, and infinite points lay in between.
When Cinzia bit into the bistecca, she said something that caught me by surprise: “It is not so perfect.” She had just swallowed a morsel that was not the embodiment of tenderness. “But it is authentic,” she said, and I had to agree. The problem was that I couldn’t stop thinking of Italy’s neglected authentic food. The Podolica, barely loved, grazed in obscurity in the south on a hillside on which even the monks have given up. While Chianinas enjoyed their unexpected rise to celebrity, the Maremmana languished. Would they, like the pugnitello grapes, one day flirt with extinction?
I took another sip of wine. “The bistecca is indeed authentic,” I said, turning to Cinzia. “But I think since we’re drinking pugnitello wine, it would be even more authentic to eat a Maremmana bistecca.”
Cinzia swallowed a bite of imperfect but still damned good steak, followed it with a sip of wine, and said, “I agree.”
CHAPTER FIVE
JAPAN
The Japanese are famous for their acutely overdeveloped sense of specialization. They are the world’s foremost perfectionists, even more so than Germans, and it took me all of one hour on Japanese soil to witness this singular cultural trait.
The event took place at one in the morning on the shuttle bus journey from Narita International Airport into downtown Tokyo. Like shuttle buses the world over, the one I was riding was equipped with a transponder allowing it to cruise through tollgates without waiting in line to pay. As we approached the first tollgate, the driver gave no indication of decelerating. It seemed, at first, like nothing more than exuberant driving, but as the gate got closer and the speed remained constant, the driver crossed an invisible line where collision went from unlikely to inevitable. Even if he had wanted to slow down, there wasn’t enough time to do so. I gripped the armrests and braced for impact. There wasn’t time to scream. In less than a second, the windshield would shatter and the tollgate would snap like a twig, helicoptering through the air in slow motion until it struck a toll collector handing out change, perhaps breaking the man’s collarbone. In that endless instant before impact, I pictured myself watching Japanese police push the shamed bus driver into the back of a Toyota squad car as I waited for a replacement shuttle bus to arrive. And then at the last moment, with at best inches to spare, the gate flipped up, lifting with a speed and robotic nonchalance that seemed exquisitely Japanese. The driver zoomed through and continued on toward Tokyo,