Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti Read Free Book Online Page B

kitchen to mouth, and once it’s there, he wants you to taste it as he does. And that occasionally requires spoken instruction. “The feeling of cold and hot is very different in one bite than in two bites,” he says. “Sometimes, two bites makes all the difference.”
    Because much of what’s eaten here seems without context, the meal itself, the rush of these dishes, builds a new context in which tastes emerge with shot-glass intensity from a nebula of cool mists and jellies. The idea is that a new dish will be launched every five minutes, no more than ten seconds after it’s ready, and in those intervals between dishes, a guest will experience both sensual and psychic liftoff, to be repeated five minutes later. In theory, this makes the meal two hours long, though often people will linger a couple of hours longer at the table.
    “We are inviting fifty people into our home every night,” says Ferran. “It should be the greatest event of their lives.”
    The trick, of course, is to translate the ideas of Ferran’s fertile mind into living dishes, up to two hundred different ones in a night. Further, each dish must be prepared en masse, then delivered to the table according to a nearly-impossible-to-achieve Ferran standard. And the fear of not reaching that standard is what drives the dizzying, obsessive pace in the kitchen.
    From our vantage point, it was all just an endless rush of plates passing to and fro. Suddenly, a tray crowded with goodies appeared before us, and another, and another—what Ferran calls first and second and third “snacks,” which are meant to be fun and lighten the mood before the main courses. None were recognizable.
    There was dried quinoa in a paper cone, and, when I tilted it back into my mouth, the quinoa lightly pelted my tongue and echoed in my ears like a fine rain turning crunchy. There were also seaweed nougat (salty and sublime), deep-fried bits of prawn (so light they disintegrated before they could be rightly chewed), and strawberries filled with Campari (every cell cloying, the strawberries more strawberry because of the liqueur). No sooner would one marvel cease, one of us sputtering, What was
that
?, than the next bit of Martian food would arrive. It all ended in a strange, caramelized cube that I lifted with my thumb and forefinger and gently slid onto my tongue. Only after shattering it between my teeth did the object reveal itself: yogurt bursting from its candied shell in a warm, smooth flood.
    Ferran shuttled between our table and his capos—the white-shirted generals running the kitchen—as an unceasing drift of guests came back to meet him. There was a famous wine critic who produced a rare Japanese spice. Some fabulously rich people shook Ferran’s hand and gushed, “You don’t see this every day,” and Ferran said, “No, this is every day.” A photographer from a Danish magazine, a tanned woman with very blond hair and long legs, wearing a sheer pinafore and a light-blue bikini underneath, climbed onto a table and started taking photographs. And for a second, everything stopped, sighed … then resumed in double time.
    “Where the hell are the tapiocas?” a capo yelled at the hunched-over chefs on the line. “We’re going to get punished here. Let’s go!”
    It was hard not to feel ridiculous, supping on delicacies while people worked at breakneck speed to get them to us. But we didn’t overanalyze this because the main dishes, fourteen in all, began to arrive. And each dish was … was … how to explain it?
    In Ferran Adrià’s restaurant, nothing is for certain once his food crosses the Maginot Line of your mouth. He feeds you things you never thought existed, let alone things you’d think to eat: a gelatin with rare mollusks trapped inside (it was so odd, the cool, sweet jelly parting for salty pieces of the sea, that it tasted primordial and transcendent at once), tagliatelle carbonara (chicken consommé solidified and cut into thin,