Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh Unknown (books to read for 13 year olds .txt) 📖

underappreci-ated, and she replied, “I know the feeling.” She told me one of the difficulties she encounters whenever she dines out: “I go to the ladies’

room, everybody goes.” She was perfect—understated, self-deprecating, endearing. When a woman that beautiful is that well mannered, it’s hard not to appreciate her. I reminded myself that she had yet to show any interest in food.

Our first course, the amuse-gueule, consisted of twin beggar’s purses, which are tiny crêpes filled with pricey ingredients, gathered up and tied at the top like little sacks. One contained caviar and sour cream, the other lobster and black truffles. Her admiration for Nish’s lobster-truffle creation was precisely the sort of restrained admiration I admire in a food critic. “I have to say, ‘great,’ ” she said.

Her evaluation of our second dish, a carpaccio of lobster, essentially raw lobster, was harsh. She found it “a little sad, droopy.” This was accurate enough but a bit unfair, inasmuch as virtually any dead fish will droop. The entire world of sashimi sags, for that matter.

The third course transfixed her, and Stone enraptured is a welcome sight. She liked (and I loved) the jumbo lump crabmeat with corn juice and black truffles, the juice accenting the sweetness of the crab, the truffles its faint earthiness. Yet it was her enthusiasm for the wine that made her irresistible.

The wine director of March, Joseph Scalice, had paired the crab with Château de Beaucastel white Châteauneuf-du-Pape, not the ordinary bottling but the rare 100 percent Rousanne from old vines. After sipping, she changed from a remote figure into an eager, open, giving, vulnerable one. This is what wine is supposed to do to a woman, but I’m saddened by how infrequently the transformation takes place. I believe this is because women now understand the power of alcohol and struggle against it.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

She gazed at the nectar—let’s assume a wine with no apparent residual sugar qualifies as nectar. Her eyes appeared unfocused, apparently in pleasure. She was looking at this beverage the way a woman is supposed to look at the man treating her to dinner. Still, I was pleased. She said, “The wine reminds me of the gowns of Catherine the Great—

gold with traces of pink.” I rocked backward, staggered by an arche-typal example of earth-twentieth-century winespeak. This woman was truly a gifted wine amateur.

She leaned toward me, and Sharon Stone leaning forward, drawing you into whatever drama is being played out in her mind, is a positive dining experience. “Please, please, more meals, if only we have wine like this,” she gasped. “I have sex stories. I’ll tell you everyone in Hollywood I slept with. Please, more. I’ll be a gourmet tramp.” Alas, I took her at her word.

I told her I wished to be discreet, not prurient. I only wanted to learn the motivation for her affairs, not the intimate details of them. I had been cautious throughout the first hour of our meal, saying nothing about her choices of roles (bad) or men (worse). I posed this question: Why would a woman like her, the most fascinating movie star I’d dined with since cooking for Claudette Colbert in her hotel suite some years ago (nice name-drop, wouldn’t you agree?), consort with the kind of men any sensible woman would shoot on sight?

“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning away, the Roussanne-induced twinkling of vulnerability gone.

“Dweezil Zappa,” I replied, equally cold.

She crossed her arms. “Dweezil,” she said, “was my friend for many years. And then he made enormous pleas to date me, and then I went out with him three times after knowing him for four years. And then he went on television and said he was dating me. I was disappointed by his lack of decorum and integrity, and therefore he is not in my life.”

She stared.

Was I so wrong to have asked? Doesn’t everybody want to know why F O R K I T O V E R

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Sharon Stone is dating Dweezil Zappa? Doesn’t everybody want to know why anybody dates Dweezil Zappa?

“I’d like to point something out to you,” she said.

I waited. It was that or flee.

“You dated the wrong people, too. We both fucked up.” I nodded slightly, conceding the point. Everyone makes mistakes. I attempted a rebuttal. I explained to her that were we to stand side by side, most people would select her as the individual more likely to meet a congenial partner.

“Where do I go to meet people?” she said. “The 7-Eleven? The mall?

A club? I can’t go to those places to meet people. I can’t meet people at work. That’s considered bad taste. And everybody who meets me has a preconceived notion of me. So if it’s not a friend, I start off on the wrong tangent.”

As the courses progressed, we seemed to recover from our little con-tretemps. At least that’s what I thought. I reacted sincerely and sympa-thetically when she described her life as “little, a small life.” I managed to elicit a chuckle when she asked me to explain the physics of a shoot-ing star and I replied, “It’s about friction. You understand friction, don’t you?”

She ate every bite of every dish except the wild-mushroom ravioli, which incorporated calves’ brain as a binder. Like all women, she has an infallible knack for detecting the presence of invisible ingredients capable of triggering culinary apprehensions. She said to me, “Have you ever noticed that at every long dinner, the fifth course, the one before the meat and potatoes, is the icky-poo-poo course.” I could only agree.

She was polite. I was mannerly. The meal ended well. More important, I had come to understand her palate, which is about all a man can hope to understand about a woman. When she departed, handed back over to that bulky, decidedly undroopy gentleman, I felt there was every likelihood that we would dine together again.

I didn’t know when or where