Eating a Love Story

The day he laid eyes on an apple pancake, it was love at first sight. But that was just the beginning

This is a story about how, to get the best fried chicken, you need a friend with an airplane. It's about how to find the finest steak you'll ever eat--by hanging around a crime scene. Truly great food rears its head in the most unlikely spots. Like love (or a bad oyster, for that matter), it usually finds you rather than the other way around.

I don't know about you, but for me, no matter what I'm doing, my day always revolves around my next meal. Considering most people eat three meals a day, that's more than 1,000 meals a year and, if you live long enough, something like 80,000 meals in a lifetime--not counting snacks and, of course, drinks, which can take the edge off certain memories or enhance them. The great thing about this quantity? A culinary lightning bolt can strike you at any moment. But it also means there's a lot of competition for anything to stand out as the best.

For most of us, a combination of things makes a meal great: the food itself, the people you're with, the atmosphere you're eating in and then the recollection. When the memory of a particular meal stays with you, something exceptional was going on.

What you're about to read is an instant replay of my finest food memories. Who am I? A man who has spent his life cooking, serving, eating and cleaning up. A man who has worked as a dishwasher, busboy, chef and manager and now owns a restaurant. A man who has been known to fly halfway across the country to have a Disaster omelet at a diner. (It had everything on it, and I could taste it for the next three days--a bumpy ride but well worth the trip.) If nothing else, my belt size alone makes me an authority. Consider this the longest menu you'll ever read.

Steak: Sparks Steak House, New York City

When they talk about a great meal, people say they feel as if they died and went to heaven. The opposite happened to mobster Paul Castellano, who ran the Gambino crime family, when he was heading into Sparks Steak House nine days before Christmas in 1985. He was perhaps anticipating the lump-crabmeat cocktail, the sliced tomato and onion smothered with Roquefort dressing, the crispy hash browns and the boneless shell steak cut from prime beef, a.k.a. the New York strip, charred to perfection on the outside and bloodrare on the inside. Maybe some oysters thrown in to start.

Just as Castellano stepped up to the restaurant, before he got to order or even make his way inside, John Gotti's henchmen gunned him down. Years later, the lead henchman, Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, was arrested; he allegedly confessed he had planned the hit to coincide with a time when the streets would be filled with holiday shoppers, the better to cause confusion and make a clean getaway. He didn't say anything about the cruelty of killing a man before he could enjoy his last meal. Fortunately for the rest of us, Gotti didn't want our jobs, so we can relax and enjoy what I think is the finest steak in New York or anywhere.

The first time I went to Sparks, long after the fireworks, I was working in New York, and my fiancée's father came into town for one of our first get-togethers. This was a man who spent most of his life going to fine restaurants on expense accounts, and I knew I had to take him somewhere better than good--especially since he was picking up the tab. At the time I was a sous-chef at Mortimer's, which had the dubious distinction of being named the rudest restaurant in America by Money magazine. Believe it or not, when you work in the restaurant business you don't have many chances to eat out, so I consulted some experts. The unanimous vote was for Sparks.

I walked into Sparks's packed bar that night a ball of nerves, and my prospective father-in-law, Arnold, was waiting. He was a silver-haired dapper dresser who had been a scratch golfer and even then, in his 70s, could shoot his age. All his suits were custom-made in Italy, and he knew a thing or two about the finer things in life. Meanwhile I had a ponytail and sang in a rock band. He was ready to be unimpressed by me.

After downing a couple of Smirnoffs on the rocks, Arnold saw a large man in a sports coat sitting at the end of the bar, eating what I could tell from 10 feet away was one of the greatest melons I had ever seen. It looked like the famous and elusive Hand melon at the height of summer, but this was the middle of winter and we were nowhere near upstate New York, the area it comes from. (The Hand melon is a melon insider's secret. It's a softball-size, orange-fleshed, sweet beauty that grows near Saratoga Springs, cultivated at the farm owned by the Hand family.) I gleaned Arnold's soft spot right then--he, who could stare down a Teamsters picket line without breaking a sweat, turned to mush at the sight of a good crenshaw. He sidled up to the man and said, "Who do you have to know to get a melon like that?"

The man straightened and said, "You have to know me. I own this place, and when we have it, everybody who wants it gets this melon." That was Pat Cetta, with whom I instandy fell in love. Everybody did. He was the kind of guy who becomes an immediate friend of the family; by Christmas my now wife was baking him cookies, which he treated like a gift of precious gems.

Arnold and I took a seat and ordered. Our table, which was of the old-fashioned variety, was covered with not one but two crisp white cloths, allowing the attentive waiters to perform a sleight-of-hand trick and switch the tablecloth midmeal, keeping the cloth our plates were on perpetually spotless. The wine list had more than a thousand bottles--every one a standout, from the reasonably priced to the stratospheric. Every aspect of the meal was fantastic, but the highlight was the steak: the way it was aged and seasoned on the outside, the thinnest crust of crisply charred prime meat giving way to the buttery tenderness inside. Neither of us had ever experienced anything like it. And the tomatoes with Roquefort, the hash browns and the creamed spinach took that singular piece of meat to the next level.

That night I had die best steak and the best service of my life and, more important, so did my future father-in-law. Over melon and a great New York strip, we bonded.

The incomparable Pat Cetta is sadly no longer around, but Sparks is, and whenever I want the best steak of my life, I drop by.

Breakfast: Walker Bros. the Original Pancake House, Wilmette. Illinois

Read no further if you're on a diet or have a heart condition. Apple pancakes, when prepared correctly, start with a stick of butter. In case you've never counted the little blue lines on the wrapper, that's eight tablespoons. And then the sugar is added.

Taste in pancakes is something as individual as a fingerprint. Some people like pancakes in a stack with maple syrup; some like them with blueberries; some go for chocolate chips. But for me, the pinnacle is the apple pancake at Walker Bros. the Original Pancake House. Sliced apples are sautéed in butter, cinnamon and sugar, an egg batter is thrown on top, and then the whole skillet is tossed into the oven. Moments later out comes a huge, puffy, oozing creation that looks nothing like a pancake, coated in caramelized sugar so hot that if you eat it too quickly, it'll take the roof off your mouth and stick there like a caramel apple pulled from a blast furnace. You need a side of the extra-thick bacon, perfectly crisp, to offset the sweetness, and a cup of coffee or a cold glass of milk to wash it down.

I first ate this pancake as a kid. My parents, my eight brothers and sisters and I would go to Walker Bros. after Sunday mass, usually on special occasions. Organizing a meal for nine kids was never easy. (If you remember the first scene in Caddyshack, you'll get an idea; my brother Brian co-wrote the film and based that scene on our family.) Taking nine kids out to a restaurant was even harder. We always had to wait for a big table, and that meant standing for 15 minutes or so, my eyes bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls as waitresses went by carrying trays of food. Did I want that? No, I liked that...or that!

In the end it didn't matter. Everyone ordered something different, and by the time it all came we had the entire menu covered. Our table was like an all-you-can-eat buffet, heaped with a jumble of plates of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon and French toast--and those were just the basics. My sister Laura always ordered the incredible Dutch baby, which was like a giant popover filled with fruit and coated in a blizzard of powdered sugar; my dad was partial to the German pancake, sort of a naked Dutch baby that rivaled the apple pancake in size and sheer density; and of course two or three of us always had the apple pancake. This was the one place on earth where there was more food than 11 people could finish.

Every time I'm in Chicago I make a pilgrimage out of the city and up Green Bay Road to Walker Bros. If any of my brothers or sisters are around, they meet me there. It doesn't matter what time it is; there's no law against breakfast at any time of day. We still order one of everything, which is always way too much, and we still can't finish it. But it's not for lack of trying.

Unlike a lot of other places these days, everything served at Walker Bros, is real--no McFood. Real eggs, whole milk, real butter and, for the coffee, real heavy cream, the kind that floats on top like a pillow. Let's be honest: None of it is good for you, but who cares? If I'm going to go, I might as well go facedown in an apple pancake.

Fried Chicken: The Lady and Sons, Savannah

There's nothing like fried skin when it comes on a chicken. It's crispy, seasoned perfectly and, on the rare occasions when it's done right, greaseless. I've tried KFC, Church's, Popeyes and, when desperate, Swanson, but the best fried-chicken moment I can remember occurred on a private jet.

As my brother Joel once told me, the next best thing to having your own swimming pool is having a brother with a swimming pool. A brother with an airplane is a variation on that. A couple of years ago my brother Bill treated a few family members to a ride on a trijet Falcon 50 to a nephew's wedding in Savannah. There we discovered Paula Deen and her two sons, better known as the Lady and Sons, which is also the name of their restaurant, an old Southern-saloon-style place housed in a brick building downtown. They make the best fried chicken in America and serve it up at an all-you-can-eat buffet, surrounded by mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits, corn bread, and macaroni and cheese--but that's a whole other story. The fried chicken from the Lady and Sons is a story all its own.

The low-carb craze has everybody writing off fried food, and I think that's a mistake. I knew we'd hit rock bottom when Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its name to KFC. Does the company think if it removes the F word, people will mistake its food for chicken paillard? Great fried chicken is not ashamed of itself. It is confident in its identity. It is not greasy. It's light, the skin is crispy, not soggy, and the crust and skin are integrated into something sublime. That's what you get at the Lady and Sons. When it was time to take off from Savannah, we didn't want to leave that chicken behind.

I called and asked, "What are the chances you could put together 60 or 70 pieces of fried chicken to go?" The first person I talked to was skeptical; she said that would constitute the entire contents of the restaurant buffet, but I persevered. Eventually I connected with the banquet coordinator, a honey-voiced Southern belle who understood a need for quantity.

On the way to the airport we screeched up in front of the restaurant in a beat-up 1985 Dodge minivan; about eight of us were stuffed inside with our luggage. Deen's boys, Jamie and Bobby, were waiting with three giant pans, the kind you cook 30-pound turkeys in, full of chicken. The plan was to bring it back home, split it up and take it to our respective homes for dinner.

That chicken never made it off the plane. The smell of perfectly fried chicken wafted through the cabin. Bill had just come off location for a movie that required him to be in shape to work in a wet suit for six months. Let's just say he was hungry. First we had a few pieces. Then we had seconds. Then the stewardess had to have some. Then the pilots came into the cabin. I have no idea who was flying the plane, but nobody seemed to care.

Then again, was it the chicken or the plane? When Bill and I travel back home from Chicago on a private jet, after opening day at Wrigley Field, for instance, we always swing by Mr. Beef and get a dozen Chicago Italian beef sandwiches, five or six hot dogs, some shoestring fries and a couple of large sodas and eat them until all we can do is fall asleep. With all the headlines about cutbacks in airplane food, this is good advice: Call ahead, get your taxi or car to pull over, and carry out. Especially if you have your own plane. Or better yet, your brother's.

(concluded on page 120) Eating (continued from page 94)

Mexican: La Super-Rica Taquena, Santa Barbara, California

Heading north on the 101, pull off at Milpas Street in Santa Barbara and you'll see a ramshackle, 1950s-style white shack with turquoise trim, a hard plastic awning and cheesy plastic outdoor furniture. Don't blink or you'll miss it. The place used to be an Orange Julius (remember Orange Julius?). Today it's a Mexican joint run by the Gonzalez family--Isidoro, his brother and their parents, in their 80s, who still work there. The first thing you notice: the line, a mile long at any time of day. In that line, waiting patiently for as long as it takes, may be carpenters on break, movie stars, yuppies, tattooed bikers, sports stars, billionaires and lots of smart locals, including in her day the late Julia Child. (After she got older and became wheelchair-bound, Isidoro delivered to her upscale retirement community. One of her favorite meals was Super-Rica's banana-leaf tamales.)

You find a parking place and join the line, reading the menu scribbled on the giant blackboard behind the grill, which is directly behind the counter. Hopefully you'll remember your high school Spanish. You can see the line cooks hand-pressing corn tortillas one at a time, and as they hit the grill you can smell the onions and the different meats going onto the flat-top for the tacos and the tamales--the carne asada, the pork, the chorizo. On Fridays there are seafood tamales. Everything is served on paper plates, with paper napkins and plastic forks.

True, every Mexican place has this food, but there is nothing like the version served at Super-Rica. The homemade tortillas make a world of difference. Everything tastes homemade because it is; it's made right there while you watch. "I got my inspiration from the food vendors on the streets of Mexico City," Isidoro will tell you.

What if you're not in Santa Barbara on the 101? I used to live in Los Angeles, nearly two hours away. A friend who did sound for Smokey Robinson was in town once for some golf with the Motown great, and he dropped by and asked where we should eat. I think he had something on Rodeo Drive in mind. But since he was from New York, I told him he needed to see the central coast. He said, "Aren't we in southern California?"

We headed north.

It was going on dusk when we arrived at Super-Rica to find it was closing. I felt like crying, and they must have noticed. We didn't ask, but they started sending food out to us on the patio. I don't think that happens often, but it was one of those days when everything goes right. We slumped happily over our paper plates on the plastic furniture under the hard plastic awning, the table precariously overloaded with seafood tamales, alambre de filete with vegetables, chorizo especial de queso, tacos de chuleta, guacamole (no chips! Super-Rica does not serve chips. I don't know why), and vegetarian tamales--all served with gobs of fresh salsa. A six-pack of Dos Equis and we were livin'.

Sushi: Matsuhisa, Beverly Hills

My friend Don, who is a great chef, came to L.A. one year to work at the American Wine & Food Festival, a fund-raiser sponsored by Wolfgang Puck. This is a blockbuster culinary event that supports the Los Angeles chapter of Meals on Wheels. It's held on the Universal Studios back lot and is one of the most incredible food events in the country. Fifty chefs and more than 60 vintners from all over the world are showcased for charity. This particular year, Nobu, the now legendary sushi restaurant, had just opened in New York City, and Don was working at Tribeca Grill, which is part of the same restaurant group. I'd worked at Tribeca Grill with Don, so I immediately offered my services.

If you haven't heard of Nobu Matsuhisa, he is without a doubt the greatest sushi chef in the world. Today he has restaurants in London, Tokyo, Malibu, Aspen, Beverly Hills, Vegas, Miami Beach, Milan, Dallas, Mykonos (seasonal only) and the Bahamas, but at the time, he wasn't as well-known, and on this particular occasion he was working in the booth next to Don and me. We fed thousands of people that night. The crowd moved from booth to booth, with people stopping four or five times at Nobu's. We never saw Wolfgang. He had an impenetrable crowd around his booth.

When it was over, around 11 at night, I looked at Don and said, "We need a drink." Nobu looked over at us and said, "You come back to my place to eat. I'm going to fix you some food." I have to admit, we were thinking about liquor, about the afterparty, but Nobu was insistent. He has a smile people can't resist, and that is no small factor in his success. Half an hour later we were seated at Matsuhisa, his restaurant on La Cienega. It's a sleek, modern Japanese place--very simple and comfortable.

Nobu put Don, me and three other chefs from the festival at a table and disappeared into the kitchen. The place was just about empty, ready to shut down for the night. I looked at Don and said, "Did we make the right move, or should we go on to that party?"

Don, who knew Nobu from New York, said, "Just relax. You're going to go for a ride."

Within seconds bottles of cold sake came out in bamboo containers, which were never empty for the rest of the evening. The sake was so refreshing, our tiredness evaporated, and you could sense an energy, as if something wonderful were about to happen. Then the sushi and the sashimi started. Nobu sent out salmon, toro, tuna, yellowtail, Spanish mackerel and Chilean sea bass. The fish couldn't have been fresher, and the vinegared rice underneath was the perfect complement. There was a hint of wasabi but no overkill. Nobu had studied in Peru, and he uses Peruvian chili paste and other things you don't often taste. He did a sashimi salad that broke all the rules and blew our minds in the process. More dishes followed, each one a piece of art: a flower-shaped plate of perfectly sliced red snapper arranged in a circle, baby-squid tem-pura, then grilled octopus and all sorts of wonderfully fresh, briny oysters with different sauces.

Every once in a while you heard a few grunts or moans. Nobody at the table was capable of carrying on a conversation, we were so submerged in the food. It was like an out-of-body experience, only edible. Nobu was the perfect host, and he kept going back to the kitchen to tell his chefs to send out specific dishes. Don told me Nobu insisted on die highest-quality ingredients on the planet, no matter what the cost, and it showed. With him it was all about perfection, something he actually managed to achieve. For a finale he served a huge plate on a mirror; on it were a couple of lobsters, cut up and fanned out in the shape of the sun. It was so beautiful, it was a shame to eat it. But that didn't stop us.

That night I experienced flavors and foods I'd never even thought about eating before, even with years of experience in the restaurant business, working at places that had garnered their own sets of stars. But this was different. This was it: the greatest meal I've ever had.

Nobu had studied in Peru, and he uses Peruvian chili paste and other things you don't often taste.