I couldn’t help but think of how my father, who was a practical and eminently thrifty man, would have responded to the news that I intended to fly to Paris for a dinner. “For dinner,” he would have said—not exactly asking a question but restating the proposition, as if trying to make certain he could possibly have heard it correctly. “To Paris.”
“Well, two dinners, actually,” I would have said, figuring that attending two events in the same city would make the trip sound something on the order of killing two birds with one stone.
He would have been nodding his head by then—the nod he customarily employed while receiving any confirmation of his old fear that I might turn out to be too goofy to find my way in out of the rain. Implying that a trip to Paris is necessary because it involves two dinners rather than one, I should have realized, would not impress a man who, having been brought to western Missouri from the Ukraine as an infant, was able for several years in the ’50s to stave off my mother’s European-tour aspirations with a succinct “I’ve been.”
“I’m going on business,” I would have explained. “Sort of.”
My father—who spent most of his business life as a grocer, getting up at four in the morning six days a week to go to the market to select his produce—wouldn’t have even bothered to answer that one.
I suppose I would have then said something about the fact that one of the dinners was a birthday celebration for someone I had known for several decades, R. W. Apple, Jr., of The New York Times—also the son of a grocer, I might have added, although Apple’s family, who owned a chain of supermarkets in Akron, presumably delegated the predawn produce run to others. I met Johnny Apple, as he’s universally known, when we were college-newspaper editors. Much more recently, I’d published a magazine profile of him. It discussed, among other matters, how, after decades as a remarkably productive foreign correspondent and political reporter, he’d managed to transform himself, before our very eyes, into the Times’ roving gourmand, still headquartered in Washington but increasingly attracted more by foreign tables than by foreign wars. Since Apple had always been known in the trade for managing to live the good life even when he found himself in unappealing environs, the transformation had not come as a surprise to his friends, some of whom openly admired his expense accounts even more than they admired his dispatches.
Apple is someone who seems equally famished whether he’s sitting down to dinner at a three-star French restaurant or at a crab shack; he is what A. J. Liebling would have called, admiringly, a feeder. Despite maintaining an energy level that makes some of his colleagues sigh, he is now, by my rough estimate, the size of about two and a half Parisians. In the magazine piece, I’d imagined that people who meet him for the first time—somehow, despite Apple’s best efforts, there are still human beings on the planet he doesn’t know—“might assume that some time-travel production of The Man Who Came to Dinner had managed to land Sir John Falstaff for the role of Sheridan Whiteside.” After the piece was published, Apple began referring to me as his Boswell. I began saying of Apple, “I put him on the map.”
So when a letter came inviting me to Apple’s 70th birthday party, to be held at Chez L’Ami Louis, in Paris, I accepted with alacrity. A lot of other people did the same. When Apple said he was touched that so many of his friends were willing to travel all that way to celebrate his birthday, I felt called upon to remind him that there was no way to know how much of the affection reflected in the high acceptance rate was for him and how much for Chez L’Ami Louis and how much for Paris. He had neglected, I pointed out, to put together a control group of people invited to celebrate his birthday in, say, the dining room of the third-finest commercial hotel in his hometown. The entry for Chez L’Ami Louis in the Paris edition of the eponymous restaurant guide published by Tim and Nina Zagat (two of Apple’s birthday guests, as it turned out) does, after all, include reports from readers like “the best bistro in the world.” It also includes the phrase “geared for ‘trenchermen on high doses of cholesterol-lowering drugs’”—meaning that a lot of the invitees must have sent in their acceptances only after resolving to observe a personal Ramadan in the weeks leading up to the big event.
Not long after I’d sent in my own acceptance, I remembered that I was Apple’s Boswell, and I decided to demote myself from legitimate guest to working press. After that transformation, I told Apple, I began to feel like the pool reporter at Yalta. Then I thought of another dinner in Paris I’d been wanting to have, at the home of an American couple I know there, David Jaggard and Nancy Li. David and Nancy are serious eaters who have always devoted an impressive amount of energy to trying to find superior Chinese food in Paris—a task that has, at times, seemed about as promising as searching for a decent chicken-fried steak on the Upper East Side. Nancy has, among her other talents, the ability to read the wall signs in Chinese restaurants. This is an ability I have always coveted, even after the first sign she translated for me, in a surprisingly good Chinese restaurant on the Avenue de Choisy that she and David led me to half a dozen years ago, turned out to say “Big Intestines in Salty Water.”
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.
The first such operation, the forthrightly named Fried Dumpling, happens to be right across Allen Street from a restaurant I patronize, Congee Village, which means that Congee Village is the only place where I welcome the news that a table will not be available right away. The wait presents an opportunity to nip across the street for a dollar’s worth of hors d’oeuvres. At a rival establishment nearby—Dumpling House, on Eldridge Street—I broadened my horizons from dumplings to egg and chive pancakes (which are actually more like empanadas) and then to something called beef with sesame pancake—a sandwich on what looks like a slice of sesame focaccia. Not having tried the much-celebrated new restaurants recently opened by famous chefs at the Time Warner Center, I can’t say categorically that Dumpling House’s beef with sesame pancake, which costs a dollar and a half, tastes as good as anything they have to offer, but that is my suspicion.
Put in the context of Shandong province, David Jaggard’s all-caps exultation about the dumplings didn’t seem surprising—which made me all the more eager to try Yang’s version. Since David and Nancy live in a very small apartment, I was restricted to a tiny guest list compared with Apple, who had at his disposal more than 50 places. I began with a policy of including no ambassadors at all. Then I asked some friends who live in Paris and three people who would be facing the music at Chez L’Ami Louis the next evening. Two of the Apple celebrators were Alice Waters and her daughter, Fanny. The other one was Joseph Lelyveld, who, until his retirement, was a longtime colleague of Apple’s on The New York Times. What I thought made Joe a particularly appropriate guest was that in the ’70s, when Times management was getting signals that American newspaper bureaus would soon be permitted in Beijing, he was sent to Cambridge, England, for a year, to study Mandarin. (When the signals turned out to be premature, he became the bureau chief in Hong Kong, where people speak Cantonese.) At the Times, Joe distinguished himself at a number of posts, including the editorship of the paper, but he was apparently not a gifted student of Mandarin. His accent problem was so profound, he has said, that when he finally got to the mainland some years later and tried using what he’d learned at Cambridge to make an innocuous remark about the weather to a man sitting next to him on a riverboat, the man replied, “Sorry, I don’t speak English.” But I figured that it would all come back to him when he tasted Yang’s dumplings.
I like a chef who brings her own cleaver. Yang was slicing fine disks of lotus root with her own cleaver when I arrived at David and Nancy’s apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up near a fine market street called the Rue des Martyrs, in the 9th arrondissement. David and Nancy have what the French call a cuisine américaine—an open kitchen—so Yang would be preparing and cooking right next to where we’d be eating. The other implement she’d brought along was a rolling pin, although it looked like a small dowel; she would be using it to roll out individual dumpling skins. The lotus root, done with sugar and vinegar, was one of the three cold dishes we began with, once we crowded around the table. The others were cold spicy chicken and a sort of salad that included dried tofu and what David called “your weight in garlic.” I believe the guests thought of the cold dishes as the lead-in to the dumplings; they seemed to indicate that by eating just about everything on the table. As it turned out, though, the dumplings were a long way down the road. First, we had something that Yang calls Big Pot, a soupy dish that came in, well, a big pot and included angel-hair noodles and cabbage and faux ham. That was followed by an egg and chive dish that tasted remarkably like the filling of a Dumpling House egg and chive pancake, which is a fine thing to taste like.
Then we had stuffed eggplant fritters—pockets of eggplant that were crammed with a pork mixture, battered, and fried on a high heat for so long that Alice Waters, who was standing at the stove observing Yang in action, had to restrain herself from calling out a warning that they might be burning. They weren’t. They emerged looking like small croque-monsieur. As each batch came out, it was put on the table, so no more time intervened between pan and plate than it does in a first-rate tempura restaurant in Japan. I was disappointed when the fourth batch turned out to be our final go at the stuffed eggplant fritters, although my disappointment was mitigated by the way Yang had prepared a grouper. Then, finally, she started rolling out the dumpling skins, and we prepared for the main course.
Fried pork dumplings. Steamed pork dumplings. Fried vegetable dumplings. Steamed vegetable dumplings. They were all spectacular. At some point, I realized I couldn’t hold any more dumplings. “I now regret having the fourth stuffed eggplant fritter,” I announced to the table. “I wish I could bring myself to say that I regret having the third stuffed eggplant fritter, but, in all honesty, I cannot.” Then, relieved by the confession, I found room for one more steamed vegetable dumpling. Joe decided he would attempt a particularly elegant sentence he knew in Mandarin to express our appreciation to the chef—a sentence that translates roughly as “Our fortune in eating has certainly not been small.” He directed it to Yang. Looking completely puzzled, she glanced over to Nancy for assistance. Nancy looked puzzled. Then, everyone applauded. Yang beamed. So did Joe.
One of the people Apple invited to his birthday party—Charles Eisendrath, a former Time magazine correspondent who’s now a journalism professor at the University of Michigan—summed up Chez L’Ami Louis in his toast as “that divine imitation cheap restaurant.” It’s on a street that’s just a notch above an alley, not far from the Place de la République. It has a simple storefront, with a red-checked curtain halfway up the window. Inside the one rather narrow room, plain brown walls look as if they’ve had, over the years, several dozen coats of varnish. Although there are coat hooks—in fact, you might say that coat hooks constitute one of the principal design elements—it’s customary at Chez L’Ami Louis to store coats on the slatted racks above the coat hooks. Waiters take a customer’s new Armani coat, roll it lengthwise, and toss it from the middle of the room onto the rack. It looks foolhardy, but I suspect that they miss the rack about as often as those legendary fish slingers at the Pike Place Market, in Seattle, overthrow a halibut. The restroom is downstairs, reached by a narrow stairway that has a banister made of heavy rope. According to one of the legends about Chez L’Ami Louis, a Michelin inspector told Antoine that his restaurant could never get a star without improving access to the bathrooms, and Antoine asked, in a more direct way than I’m putting it here, whether people come to a restaurant to eat or to go to the bathroom.
For the birthday evening, tables had been given names of places where R. W. Apple, Jr., had hung his hat—his hometown of Akron, for instance, and London, where he was once the Times bureau chief. I was seated at Nairobi, among a group of what appeared to be pretty hearty eaters. Apple, in his characteristic checked shirt, announced that we had gathered from eight countries and a half century or so of friendships. We were to choose one of three main courses being offered—chicken or pheasant or beef. As for the first courses and side dishes, both served family style, one of the guests later offered this explanation that I found persuasive: “It’s my understanding that Apple has simplified what could be a terribly difficult choice by telling them to bring everything.”
That included both foie gras and pata negra ham, served with the house’s customary sliced baguettes; snails that we thought we were consuming at a respectable pace until Apple stopped by our table to say that in his prime he had once downed three dozen of them at this very restaurant; scallops with parsley and roasted cloves of garlic; mountainous plates of shoestring potatoes; and Chez L’Ami Louis’s signature pommes Anna, made with garlic and goose fat, which got my vote for dish of the evening. I had expected the dinnertime conversation to be similar to the table talk at some particularly fancy wedding, where, after the obligatory remarks about how lovely the bride looks, everyone gets down to the question of how much the whole affair must have cost—or maybe a variation of such a conversation that included not just how much the whole affair must have cost but how Apple was going to manage to lay it off on The New York Times. Having heard no such conversation at the Nairobi table, I thought about telling Apple that the absence of speculation on what would have been the grandest Apple expense-account legend of all was a sign of his guests’ sincere affection and appreciation. Then it occurred to me that they might have simply been too busy eating to talk.
Charlie Eisendrath’s after-dinner toast, the first of the evening, had to be read by another guest, since Eisendrath had remained in Michigan. “Just thinking about Apple’s 70th birthday dinner gave me a heart attack,” he wrote, referring to a real but fortunately mild infarction. “On evenings like this, there’s something to be paid. This is to tell you not to worry: I settled that part of the account for everyone.” Some guests toasted Apple for his generosity of spirit and his appetite and his zest for life, and the birthday boy replied with a speech that reserved particular thanks for his wife, Betsey, and for the current proprietor of the restaurant, Louis Gadby, who gave a rather lengthy speech of his own in French. After celebrating Apple as a journalist and thanking him for his loyal patronage for so many years, the incumbent Louis was moved to say that if Apple held his 80th birthday party at Chez L’Ami Louis, he, Louis, would furnish free aperitifs. For a French innkeeper, I thought, that was rather forthcoming.
A week or so later—a week during which some of the guests, if their morning-after vows are to be believed, spent consuming nothing more than dry toast and tea—reports started drifting in about some of Apple’s post-party eating. Peter Kaminsky, a food writer I know, e-mailed me that on the day after the party he’d had a large lunch with the Apples and some other people at a bistro called Le Dauphin, which specializes in the substantial food of southwestern France. I also heard that the Apples had gone from Paris to “eat their way through Austria” and then make their way to the three-star Auberge de l’Ill, near Strasbourg.
Not true, Apple said, when I checked my information with the great man himself. It was Alsace that he and Betsey ate their way through. The Auberge de l’Ill part was accurate, he said, and so was the lunch at Le Dauphin, where he’d been quite pleased with the oysters followed by pig’s cheek. Although the birthday meal may have provoked some guests into launching rigorous diets and may have given Charlie Eisendrath an anticipatory heart attack, the feeder whose birthday was being celebrated had treated it as an hors d’oeuvre.