Around the time I heard about the Apple dinner, David e-mailed me about a brilliant Chinese chef in Paris. This was someone who had trained in China to be a soprano, and, according to Nancy, could still turn out a credible rendition of a Red Guard–era ditty entitled “I Don’t Want Makeup; I Want a Military Uniform.” After leaving China for a country where the songs had a little more bounce, the soprano had made a business out of going to people’s houses to prepare a Chinese meal that included what David described in his e-mail as “THE GREATEST DUMPLINGS” he’d ever tasted. I asked David if we could engage the Chinese cook on the evening before Apple’s birthday party. I think it was his use of all capital letters that got me.
A few weeks before I left for Paris, Apple happened to be in New York, and we met for lunch—at Le Bernardin, given the importance of the occasion—to discuss his birthday bash. It’s not easy interviewing Apple in a restaurant, since somebody is constantly coming over to the table with a little something that the chef thought (correctly) the great man might like to try. I don’t mean that I mind being interrupted by, say, calamari and shrimp ravioli with white truffles, in the way I might mind being interrupted by one of those fern-bar waiters who’s always coming over just before someone’s punch line to say, “You guys doing okay over here?” There are interruptions and there are interruptions. And, once I’d wolfed down the ravioli and the other little somethings, there was plenty of time to get some advance information about the guest list.
Apple, I was told, expected guests from the worlds of journalism and diplomacy and politics and academia and food. Some of the people he’d invited dated from an early stint in Vietnam. Some of them, presumably including the three foreign ambassadors on the list, were friends from his years in Washington. Reporters tend to live in the present, though, and many of those invited were people Apple might expect to come in contact with on his current beat—Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse, for instance, whom I’ve described as the Emma Goldman of the New American Cuisine, and four or five people who write about food in America or in England. He also expected his tenth-grade girlfriend, which meant that I had lost my chance at being the guest who had known the birthday boy the longest. It was predicted that I would come in second, since the architect James Stewart Polshek, who grew up around the corner from the Apples in Akron, had declined the invitation on what Apple seemed to regard as rather flimsy grounds: The party in Paris fell on the same weekend as the dedication, in Little Rock, of the Bill Clinton presidential library, which Polshek (with Richard Olcott) designed.
Apple had decided to take over Chez L’Ami Louis for this grand occasion, he said, essentially because it is his favorite restaurant—the place he names when he is asked, as people who write about food invariably are, where he would eat if he had only one meal left. He said he’d become a regular there at least 25 years ago—in the days when the legendary old proprietor, Antoine, was still doing the roasting of whatever meat or fowl had managed to measure up to his standards. At Chez L’Ami Louis, Apple told me, “There’s nothing pretentious, nothing twee. It’s hearty food based on good ingredients.” I hadn’t actually eaten there since Antoine departed, but Apple assured me that it remained essentially unchanged. It’s a famously decrepit-looking joint, probably best known for its bricks of foie gras and its roast chicken—a place where I can imagine the chef answering a question about what his favorite sauce is by asking, “Does goose fat count?” The common complaint that it is as expensive as a fancy two-star restaurant is relevant only if you’d actually rather eat in a fancy two-star restaurant than at a superior bistro. When it gets right down to it, I suppose, Apple and I, both feeders from the Midwest, wouldn’t. “While I like haute cuisine,” Apple said, as he lifted a forkful of poached skate wing with cardamom that seemed pretty haute to me, “I love peasant cuisine.”
That’s more or less the way Nancy Li described the meal we’d be having at her apartment. She said, “Simple peasant food.” The chef, Xiao Yang, who apparently spoke little French and no English, had acquired her cooking technique not from apprenticing at a restaurant or attending a culinary academy but from keeping her eyes open in her mother’s kitchen. It occurred to me, just for a moment, that in the imaginary conversation with my father I might have said, “I’m going to Paris for two dinners, but both of them are just peasant food.” The discussion Nancy and David and I had about the upcoming meal was conducted by e-mail rather than over skate wings with cardamom. It, too, was promising, partly because I was informed that Yang’s simple peasant food was from Shandong province, a place strongly associated in my mind with dumplings.
Ever since the Immigration Act of 1965 rejuvenated New York’s Chinatown, devotees of Chinese food can at times get the feeling that cuisines from an unending supply of provinces arrive on these shores one by one, in stately procession. It’s as if one of those wedding planners who stand in the back of the church and tell each participant in the wedding party precisely when to march down the aisle is standing at the Beijing airport saying “Your turn now, Sichuan” or “Fujian, just fall into line three past Hunan.” The people from Shandong arrived fairly recently—although their beer, Tsingtao, named after the capital of the province, has, of course, been familiar in the United States for years. Instead of starting full-service restaurants, they opened small storefronts on the edges of Chinatown and specialized in what some people believe is the greatest food bargain in New York—fabulous fried pork dumplings that are still priced at five for a dollar.
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