Anything That Moves (24 page)

At Grant Achatz's Next, the menu is thematic, often historical, and changes four times a year: Paris 1906, traditional Japanese
kaiseki.
This past winter, the menu was “The Hunt.” I couldn't resist it, and flew to Chicago to eat. I invited my mother, who lives in St. Louis. During ten years of marriage to my father; she had been handed her share of pheasants to hang.

Next is a windowless space in the West Loop, a meatpacking district that is being overtaken by culinary experiments. Its neighbors are Moto and iNG, restaurants belonging to Homaro Cantu, an inventor, cook, and consultant to industrial food companies. In a lab at Moto, he worked on making a vegan egg, and, in a closet-like “farm” off the kitchen, he grows his own microgreens, square watermelons, and heirloom tomatoes. iNG is devoted to taste-tripping with miracle berry, a West African fruit containing a protein that temporarily tricks the tongue into perceiving sour as sweet, which Cantu believes can alleviate world hunger and reduce carbon emissions by encouraging people to eat otherwise unpalatable plants. iNG's menus are double-designed, to taste like one thing before you eat the berry, and another altogether when the berry is in effect.

At Next, you are not a diner eating in a restaurant, you are an actor in a play about food. We took our seats. Over the white tablecloth the spotted pelt of a fawn was draped; before me was an eighteenth-century sterling walnut pick. “This is a rare opportunity to experience the flavors of the wild—foraged plants, hunted meats, offal—the more primal sensations that we don't get to encounter in our supermarkets,” the waiter said. The menu would explore the hunt as an evolutionary necessity and a cultural artifact, from the prehistoric thrill of searing meat on a hot stone to the aristocratic indulgence of eating game from gilded plates.

A glass jewel box with brass hardware was placed on the pelt, steamy and green, a Kew Gardens in miniature. The waiter gave us each a wooden bowl and filled it, from a teapot, with maitake mushroom consommé. “Flip the lid,” he said. I was preoccupied with the consommé, a salty, beefy, deep liquor I had to stop myself from drinking in one shot, and didn't hear him. “If you would,
flip the lid
.” The box held two roasted maitake mushrooms, surrounded by snippets of herbs and a roasted onion. “Eat only the mushrooms out of the terrarium,” the waiter said. As soon as he was gone, we stabbed the onion with our walnut picks and devoured it, too.

A tall, skinny server with a bushy red beard and a winking aspect slipped my mother a flask curved to fit a hip. “A wee bit of brandy to keep a hunter warm,” he said. She waited a second, adjusting to the weird order of events—armagnac with the second course—and asked for something to pour it in.

“Oh! Did you want a glass?” He appeared genuinely confused. “The intention is to taste it out of the flask.” She blushed and did what he said. The charcuterie—rabbit pâté, elk jerky, wild boar salami, blood sausage, venison-heart tartare—was served on disks of deer antler, set into a sap-oozing log. There were tiny deep purple hibiscus leaves grown in Ohio by Farmer Lee—he of the trademarked overalls—and caviar from sturgeon “wild-caught in the Caspian, then farm-raised in Florida.”

A silver candelabra appeared, and was lit: time to play nobility. Here came a cold course of woodcock, served with cocoa powder, black truffles, and a tangle of gold leaf. On one side of the plate was a dab of sauce made from hazelnuts and huckleberries, a culinary diorama that was the equivalent of a fake fern for a stuffed badger.

The next course was squab—baby pigeon—with all its parts, and offal en croute. The head, bisected, lay beside a fan of breast. At the edge of the plate was a talon. “Let's see if they eat it,” the woman at the table next to us said. She and her husband hadn't; their grown kids, sitting across from them, had. I picked up the bird by the convenient tweezer of its beak and licked out the garlic-and-parsley-soaked brain. This time I was untroubled by the brain; maybe I have a mammalian prejudice. Or maybe I was seduced by surface: this plate was supremely beautiful, its challenging elements aestheticized. A stagehand, dressed in black, sweeping, stopped and whispered to us, “When Chef Morimoto”—the Iron Chef—“was here, there were no bones left on the plate.”

It was an art-historical exegesis of a meal, with fifteen color plates. I have no idea what it might have meant to anyone else. For me, it was like feasting on my past. The smoky old flavors overwhelmed me, like a dream about a ghost that leaves you sad in the morning. I gnawed the meat from the talon, leaving the grip at the end of a spindly bone, the shrunken remains of a vanquished witch. My father would have made something fabulous from it. I almost put it in my purse. But in fairy tales purloined things have a way of turning into dust.

I
t was Easter week. My baby had just said her first word, “duck.” Jonathan Gold was busy, doesn't much like Filipino food, and, besides, is afraid of eggs. Abby Abanes—who
is
Filipina—thinks
balut
is gross. I decided to face this beast on my own. It wasn't that I had a “list”; it was a personal test. I was curious, both about what it would taste like, and about whether I could stomach it. I thought of all the challenging things I had eaten over the past few years. How bad could it be? Maybe I would even like it.

I looked on Yelp and started calling. Nobody had it. Finally, I tried a place called Bahay Kubo, near downtown, run by someone with the perfectly discomfiting name Mommy Lucing.
“Balut?”
The woman who answered the phone said. “Come tomorrow at eleven.”

The next morning, as the hour approached, I dawdled around the house. I hadn't meant to go there hungry, but, stalling, let the morning slip by, and now it was lunchtime. I got in the car, and eventually I found myself driving in a part of the city I had first come to with Gold. There was Langer's, the pastrami place, and Mama's, where we went for tamales. I had my bearings. Passing MacArthur Park, I drove up a steep hill, around a corner, and into an unfamiliar Filipino pocket. Next to an apartment complex called Manila Terrace was a low building with a green awning and a Philippine National Bank Rapid Remit center. There was an “A” in the window.

Everyone inside was Filipino. A bamboo shanty on the patio housed a large TV; the TV inside was larger, and tuned to a Filipino talent show. The service was cafeteria-style, which meant I could talk to the lady behind me in line. “Don't eat that,” she said, scrunching up her nose, when I told her I wanted to try
balut
. “What, you like feathers?” She cut me in line and left me on my own.

When it was my turn to order, I asked the man behind the counter for taro leaves in coconut milk. He was middle-aged and wore a tight red shirt, a white belt, and a diamond stud in his ear. “I don't think you're going to like it,” he said, and made me taste it before he would put it on my plate. He was wrong, though. It was an island version of creamed spinach—bitter, rich, and sweet—and I liked it fine.

On top of the glass partition separating customers from the food was a small foam box secured with red, green, and yellow tape. A sign attached to it said “
Balut
, $1.85.” “One of those,” I said. Red Shirt raised his eyebrows, opened the box, and handed me a bluish-green duck egg, still warm, that fit in the palm of my hand. “Crack it, drink the juice, and then close your eyes,” he said. At the checkout, I asked for a 7-Up. If they'd sold ginger ale, I would have ordered that, remedy of childhood.

I carried my tray to a green faux-marbled table and sat down. Taking a bite of rice, I noticed that I was actually shaking. I cracked the bottom of the egg and peeled a little. Red Shirt had come out from behind the counter and was hovering around. “Wrong end,” he said. I kept going, chipping off pieces of shell. They were espaliered with dark red blood vessels. I had never seen this before. An unfertilized egg has no need of circuitry. I put my lips up to the hole I'd made and drank the liquid, a nice light chicken broth, then peeled some more, until I saw yolk.

I picked up a white chunk. In my mouth, I felt it give way into dark reddish brown meat. I didn't need to take it out to examine it, I could see it with my tongue: my first and worst possible experience of synesthesia. I felt like a sharp-toothed animal, burrowing for meat. From my mouth, I pulled what was apparently a fingernail trimming. Meanwhile, I had to do something about the rest of the bite. Staring at nothing, keeping a bead on the talent show from the corner of my eye, like a seasick person trying to get steady, I swallowed.

I looked down at my tray. There, in the half shell, was a small creature, nestled into itself, a glazed eye, a billow of nourishing yolk. That is,
part
of a small creature.

“You should eat it all at once, if you can do it,” Red Shirt said, and handed me a shaker of salt.

Eating a creature and its food: aren't whole lifestyles built on avoiding that? And isn't foodie culture obsessed with artificially creating it? I thought of Cosentino's pig and watercress, Achatz's huckleberry and woodcock. I was a third of the way there. Why turn back now. I stole a sip of 7-Up and I took another bite. The familiar, not unpleasant taste of organ meat.

“It makes you strong,” Red Shirt said. “It's the Filipino Viagra. It's like eating an oyster.” I couldn't believe it—this darkest, most poignant maternal food, this was for men, too? I pulled the last piece of meat from the shell, determined to finish. This was a big bite, but I was almost there. Chewing, I hit an inexplicable texture, like a soft tooth. Single-minded, I mashed it to a paste and braced myself to swallow. Just as I was congratulating myself, thinking it was a mental game and I had won, something terrifying happened. From a deeper place than my taste buds—they could be tricked by a lick of chicken soup—rebellion. I felt a shift in my upper stomach, a violent bubbling, and the beginnings of a catastrophe.

I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to
The New Yorker
, in particular to David Remnick, who has encouraged me at every turn; Dorothy Wickenden, a champion and a friend; and Nick Trautwein, a singularly gifted reader and collaborator. I want to thank Sarah McGrath for providing the spark and the fuel, and all the other thoughtful, smart people at Riverhead. Eric Simonoff for gracious stewardship. Stacey Kalish and Lila Byock for many meaningful contributions. Eliza Griswold, Claire Hoffman, Meghan O'Rourke, and Kevin West for reading and re-reading. Lila again, Eric Mercado, and Nate Stein for double-checking me.

I want to thank my mother for her curiosity, perceptivity, and steel trap. You inspired this.

To the people who let me into their kitchens, met me for dinner, talked to me when they had other things that needed to be done: thank you. Your stories make the book.

My deepest thanks go to my husband, Billy, for supporting and sustaining me, and to our children for bringing me endless happiness.