If you tire of reading about perfection, there’s always my life to consider...
Author Jeff Gordinier explains how his biography of Danish superstar chef René Redzepi became something more when he started writing about his many foibles and failings alongside the achievements of the guru of Noma
Please let me apologise in advance to the reading public in the United Kingdom.
It appears that I have written a memoir. Doing so was not my original intention. There are so many memoirs coming out each year that I can’t keep track of them.
As a lover of books, I find the ubiquity of “I” annoying. Perhaps you do, too. By all appearances we have been living through a golden age of first-person vein-opening for quite some time now, with genuine masterworks like Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Ta-nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter constituting a kind of sculpture garden of the self. Good ideas lead the way to lesser ones, though, and the memoir game has approached such of a saturation point that it wouldn’t surprise me if I were to browse the shelves of my local bookstore and find titles like Twitter Is Kind of Messing Me Up and Snot, Scabs, and Unsightly Hairs: Two Decades of Picking at Myself and Hoping No One Else Would Notice.
Now, don’t think for a moment that I haven’t recognised the hypocrisy of my writing this very piece with a suspicious preponderance of I’s. The first-person voice is difficult to resist because it’s so convenient, so breezy. Which brings me – or us, better yet – to my new book. It’s called Hungry: Eating, Road-tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World. The chef I am alluding to in the title would be René Redzepi, the force behind Noma, the restaurant in Copenhagen that Redzepi has managed to turn (thanks to Bowie-level charisma, a beguiling command of the English language, a rare gift for extracting flavour from things you didn’t even know you could eat, and a demonic drive to risk everything in the pursuit of creative momentum) into the most influential gastronomic atelier of our time. Redzepi is the foodie equivalent of Bob Dylan in the 1960s, Steve Jobs in the 1980s, or Beyoncé now, and Hungry is an exclusive, behindthe-scenes chronicle of the four years I got to spend in his orbit as Redzepi, nearing 40, closed down the original Noma and conjured up a new one on a site that resembled a junkyard in Chernobyl. During these years Redzepi suffered through the repercussions of a humiliating norovirus outbreak at Noma, mapped out and executed three high-degree-of-difficulty pop-ups (in Japan, Australia, and Mexico), and logged hours in a Danish hospice while his father slowly died of cancer.
It was a dramatic time, and Redzepi is a fascinating person.
So what am I doing in the middle of his story? How did Hungry evolve from being a straightforward portrait of a cultural figure into a more elusive fusion of travelogue and memoir? (From a marketing standpoint, taking this step certainly didn’t make my life any easier. In the shelves of American bookstores I have spied Hungry in the cooking section, the travel section, the memoir section, and even the ego-puffing “literary nonfiction” section, not too far away from one of my genre-hopping heroes, Geoff Dyer. I mean, isn’t there some committee that can meet to determine where my book should go?)
Anyway, I started putting more of myself – the I that I know best – into the pages of Hungry when it dawned on me that the comic scenes in the book weren’t very funny without me. Using myself as a free-floating object of ridicule seemed to give the story a welcome touch of lightness.
There is a scene in which, carrying the ancient torch of participatory journalism, I endure the bizarre rustic workout that Redzepi and his cult-like kitchen comrades go through on any given morning. Since I make my living as a food writer, my idea of exercise is to stroll a few blocks to the train station after a 20-course tasting menu. (Unless it’s raining, of course, and it so often is.) I tried to describe Redzepi’s nauseating calisthenics from afar, with the proper journalistic distance, but the result came off as flat on the page. To make the words dance – or groan through a series of burpees – I had to shove the lumpy, lazy vessel of self into the scrum. And that’s when it clicked. A similar thing happened as I tinkered with a scene in Hungry in which – spoiler alert! – one of my dining companions at Noma, having scored the golden ticket of a meal at the best restaurant on Earth, managed to fall victim to a tragic bout of jet lag. The scene got funnier when I inserted my own neurotic punctuality into it like a frantic countermelody.
Once I had party-crashed my own book, I suppose I just decided to stick around for a while. Pretty soon I was writing about the agony of my divorce and the accumulation of tedious domestic emergencies (you lose your wallet, your phone breaks, your toddler decides to body-slam a piano) that can make contemporary life such a soul-sucking slog. I started to see that the stuckness of my own life served as a helpful counterpoint to the life of René Redzepi, Hungry’s man with a mission. I kept gnawing on the past; Redzepi kept pushing forward into the future. I felt beaten down by the way everything continually goes awry; Redzepi appeared to feed on that entropy – he almost relished the moments of chaos and breakdown so that he could figure out a new way of working and thinking. After a while I realised that I wasn’t only writing a portrait of a great chef. I was also banging out Polaroid snapshots of myself at a pivotal time in my life. Against my own natural inclinations, I was writing a memoir.
Here’s the catch, though: over the course of three months of talking about Hungry in cities across America, I have learned that those personal passages are what people like the most about the book.
I am, it turns out, “relatable.” Let’s be honest, a lot of readers
Using myself as a free-floating object of ridicule seemed to give the story a welcome touch of lightness
will never get the opportunity to eat at Noma, but many of them will endure the deep sadness of divorce, and all of them know what it means to try to keep it together from day to day when the world around you seems to be coming apart at the seams. A friend of mine has dubbed my book Eat Pray Eat Love Eat Eat Eat, and I take that as a compliment, not just because I’m a longtime Elizabeth Gilbert fan, but because this particular friend of mine has no particular interest in the rarefied realm of high-end gastronomy. He’s interested in sussing out how to navigate this mess that we called 21st century life, and if Hungry – a memoir that just happens to have a lot of food in it – can help him light the way forward, I will consider it a success.
And I suppose I have myself to thank. ● Jeff Gordinier is the food & drinks editor of Esquire magazine in the US and the author of Hungry: Eating, Roadtripping, and Risking
It All with the Greatest Chef in the World
(Icon Books) priced £16.99. Out now.