KITCHEN SHELF
Travels with the world’s best chef and an iconic cookbook revisited.
HUNGRY
Jeff Gordinier
Icon Books, $39.99
Imagine this. You’re a food writer, and one day the co-founder of a restaurant repeatedly named the best in the world, the man commonly believed to be the greatest chef on earth, invites you for coffee. After first checking it’s not a prank email from your colleagues, the only logical response would be a resounding “YES!”. This was not, however, the reaction of Jeff Gordinier, then a food writer for The New York Times. Jeff was doubtful from the moment René Redzepi – the brains behind Copenhagen’s legendary Noma – reached out. Why? It wasn’t a good time in Jeff’s life. His marriage was falling apart, for one. Also, he’d mocked René’s food ethos in his columns. Not that he’d ever eaten at Noma, or met this culinary demi-god. He was just cynical about the bandwagon-ism Noma had set loose, the scrambling of New York eateries to adopt the ‘new Nordic’ movement – where terroir was all, and locally foraged and sourced ingredients were king. “The de facto boondoggle for an American food writer was a trip to Copenhagen to go foraging on the beach with Redzepi, nibbling inquisitively on snatches of scurvy grass and sorrel, bellflowers and beach mustard”, he’d remarked. He went to meet René regardless, expecting a dressing-down; a tedious lecture on kelp and lichen; and to thoroughly dislike a chef he assumed would be too-cool-for school. Instead, it was pure charisma that walked through the door of that Manhattan coffee shop, a man with an easy laugh – and who wanted to talk tacos.
René suggested they go to Mexico to delve into that country’s cuisine. Jeff thought it impossible. René doesn’t do impossible. So they went – and thus began a long association that saw the pair travel to, or meet up in, various parts of the globe. At Pujol – regarded as Mexico City’s best restaurant – they ate ‘mole’, that Mexican staple that almost defies description. Jeff writes, “The mole at Pujol reverberated with layers of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, star anise, almonds, pecans, peanuts, onion, thyme, oregano, marjoram, dried chilhuacle rojo chiles, dried chilhuacle amarillo chiles, plantains with the skin on, and heirloom tomatoes, but even that litany of components didn’t capture what it tasted like because mole was the game that moved as you played, the answer that was always in flux, sauce as quantum physics.” Hungry is filled with such glorious detail, and it’s as much an exploration of René Redzepi, of creative genius, risk-taking and obsession, as it is of food and the lands they traverse.
And it’s a story of the relationship between two men fixated on food. In Jeff’s prose, pantry and poetry collide. Even when he reflects on the demise of his marriage, he says, “I worked over my mistakes and longings with the monotony of a penitent monk. I gnawed on my guilt like jerky.” Whatever your hunger
– for escape, for food inspiration, for the new and exciting, for insights into the workings of a genius mind, – Hungry will hit the spot. It is rich, multi-layered, delightful, luscious. It is a travel account, but it is so much more. To call Hungry a travelogue is like calling ‘mole’ a sauce.