A professional gourmand cannot afford to let himself get out of condition. Bill Knott takes a trip to the United States in order to make some amendments to his constitution.
Glutton Run
The life of an itinerant foodie has its drawbacks, you know. To cope with the constant whirl of restaurant openings, food fairs, wine tastings and Michelin-starred meals, one has to stay in the peak of condition. Training regimes must be followed rigorously: the true epicurean athlete needs to develop gustatory stamina well beyond the capabilities of his fellow man. I once spent a weekend at a health resort, eating a balanced diet and laying off the booze. It took me a whole month to recover.
I strongly believe that, with the proper training, anybody can develop a reasonable aptitude for excess, but to scale the Olympian heights of gluttony one needs something more: talent, or, as it is more commonly known, greed. Fortunately, I am blessed with an innate capacity for extreme self-indulgence.
The great enemy, of course, is complacency. I recently spent two weeks in India, which was very nearly disastrous. Despite my best attempts to stick to nehari (stewed lamb shank), biryani and rogan josh, too many healthy vegetable dishes crept into my system, and the level of blood in my alcohol stream was dangerously high. I also went swimming far more than is healthy for a food critic.
On my return, when I found myself skipping up the stairs at The Ivy two at a time, I knew that drastic action was needed. Luckily, an invitation to a food festival in Boston landed on the mat. For the gourmand, eating in America is rather like a marathon runner training at altitude. Portion sizes are immense, and, while foodie psychologists differentiate between eating proper meals and the 'grazing' mentality, most Americans simply do both. Some of their light snacks would feed a British family of four for a week.
'Welcome to Boston, America's Walking City' said the signs. Stumbling out of Logan Airport, I was hit by the coldest blast of air I have ever felt. It made Reykjavík seem positively Mediterranean. I was gratified. Cold weather always makes me hungry.
The temperature, I discovered, was -17 ? C, which, with the wind-chill factor, felt like -40 ? C. Thanks to snow drifts, walking was impossible, which fitted my plans nicely. Hitting the ground running, as it were, I stopped the taxi to buy a hamburger.
Real training began the next morning, with a deli crawl followed by lunch in Boston's Italian North End Market: spaghetti covered with piles of meatballs and gallons of sauce; sweets and cakes consumed in industrial quantities; and pizzas weighed down with pounds of topping. I warmed up with a few cannoli - fried dough shells stuffed with chocolate or vanilla-flavoured crème pâtissière.
Even in a sophisticated city like Boston, the American predilection for huge portions is never far away. At Legal Seafoods ('if it ain't fresh, it ain't legal'), gigantic portions of Arctic crab, Maine lobster and local scrod (cod) feature on a long menu, as well as various us specialities such as hush puppies (corn fritters), sweet potato mash and clam chowder. The pounds were rolling on.
Tables at Legal are generally well-spaced, which, given the amount I ate, was no bad thing. The Arctic crab, I suspect, had scuttled into the restaurant merely to shelter from the weather. It was the size of a small bulldozer. My training schedule had been going well, but now I had hit what runners call 'the wall'.
I gritted my teeth and rolled out into the tundra. I stopped for pudding at, as far as I know, the only speciality dessert restaurant in the world: it is a sign of Boston's prosperity, and Bostonians' greed, that a business like Finale can be a success. The place was packed.
I have never been a pudding fan, a weakness I have worked hard to overcome, but these went down rather well: a warm apple tart with green apple sorbet and calvados sauce, for example, and a layered pear mousse and a warm raspberry upside-down cake.
If you aim to capture the flavour of a city in just a few days, every meal time is precious. My advice is to skip breakfast but eat two lunches. You should then be ready for dinner, especially if you restrict afternoon grazing to a burger or two, half a dozen oysters and a slice of pizza. Remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint.
The final day would test whether I had reached the peak of unfitness to which I aspired. Radius, a smart new downtown restaurant, was a washout. Exquisite flavours, but tiny portions. Dinner at Rialto, in the Charles Hotel, was the final hurdle. Chef Jody Adams's menu featured aquacotta, a porcini-spiked broth with polenta, taleggio, truffle oil and a poached egg, and a huge portion of rabbit - a confit of the leg with a riesling-marinated loin - with pappardelle, trompette mushrooms and capers. Pudding slipped down a treat. Once again, I had the stomach for the fight.