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

Coke float—standard Coke, terrible ice cream, magnificent ice-cream-parlor glass—for the high price of three dollars and browsed through stacks of old magazines. One of them, a 1991

copy of China Tourism, talked about the opening of the Yangtze River Delta and the displacement of the simple Pudong residents: “The way the villagers spoke was unaffected, which was in sharp contrast to the sagacity of the Shanghainese.” The Old China Hand Reading Room is surely the original Barnes & Noble, the prototype of refreshment-ready bookstores to come.

So much is gone from Shanghai: the booming trade in silk, tea, and opium. British imperialism, French culture, Russian decadence. The pimps, hoodlums, drug runners, smugglers, and profiteers who came to ply their trades have turned to other Asian locales. Yet the future of the city seems assured. Only matters of the table remain in doubt.

Hong Kong became celebrated for its food even though it offered little but Cantonese cooking, but Shanghai has officially embraced culinary diversity. Its leaders have made it clear that home cooking alone will not do. The Chinese food of the city is masterful, but the Western cuisine does not measure up, and there’s too much of it to ignore. As an international dining capital, Shanghai falls short. To be fair, I cannot blame Communist authorities for all the dreadful Western food I sampled. No dish was more appalling than the goose-liver and chocolate terrine at the Peace Hotel, a dish that was probably on the menu back when Noël Coward took up residence and wrote Private Lives.

For that foreign-devil food item, I blame the Brits.

GQ, june 2002

T H E F R U I T S O F I S L A M

The remark was breathtakingly frank. “We do not allow whites,” said the soft-spoken woman manning the phones at the Chicago headquarters of the Nation of Islam. Hearing me inhale, she diplomatically amended her words: “Caucasians are not allowed in the mosque.” She could not have been more cordial. I had called the offices of Louis Farrakhan’s Muslim sect to find out how I might attend a Sunday meeting at the national center, the Mosque Maryam. I thought it would make an intriguing afternoon: lunch at the Nation’s new five-million-dollar South Side restaurant followed by services at the mosque.

Once I learned I would be barred from the meeting, I wondered if my plans to review the restaurant, Salaam, were also in vain. What if no whites were allowed there? Restaurant critics seeking anonymity have been known to employ disguises, but this would be a tough one to pull off.

Actually, I didn’t think even Farrakhan could get away with segre-gating his restaurant—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took care of that.

Still, I didn’t want to be forced into some kind of reverse-discrimination demonstration, sitting at the Salaam lunch counter, demanding service.

Back to the telephone I went, this time to call the restaurant. An even more polite young woman answered the phone. Not quite knowing how to word this, I stammered, “Do you . . . ummm . . . accept . . .

ummm . . . white guests?”

1 7 8

A L A N R I C H M A N

This time, it was my words that caused distress. The woman took a moment to regain her composure before assuring me that indeed they did.

I learned something from all of this: racism isn’t as simple as everybody thinks it is.

Not only am I white, I’m Jewish. Should you be under the impression that all white folks are equally distasteful to Farrakhan, you haven’t been listening to his commentaries on the Jews.

When he’s in a good mood, he likes to say that he has no problems with the Jews. Unfortunately, he’s in a bad mood a lot. Want to really get him riled? Just remind him that the Jews are the Chosen People. The man can hardly get through a public appearance without Jews upset-ting him. Now, Jews go out to eat all the time, and no restaurateur in his right mind would ever say such terrible things about such outstanding customers, but Farrakhan apparently can’t help himself.

Farrakhan, who has predicted a holy race war in America, is surely the most unlikely restaurateur in America. For that matter, the Nation of Islam is certainly the most unlikely group to be sitting around with whites, breaking bread.

Founded in 1930 by W. Fard Muhammad, who proclaimed himself Allah reincarnate, the Nation of Islam is committed to the uplifting of the black man, as well as to the separation of blacks from whites. The sect is part religious, part paramilitary, part cult, and part Project Head Start. After Fard Muhammad, the Nation was led by Elijah Muhammad, who called himself the Messenger of Allah. He preached that whites were evil mutants of blacks and that Jews were a “race of evil people,” wrote two books on food (How to Eat to Live, parts one and two), and fathered eight legitimate and thirteen illegitimate children. He died in 1975 and was succeeded by one of his sons, Wallace Deen Muhammad.

Wallace Deen Muhammad dismantled the Nation of Islam in order to take his followers on a more traditional path. Farrakhan, a formidable leader, rebuilt it. There are now an estimated 6 million Muslims in the United States; 2 million of them are black, and a modest perF O R K I T O V E R

1 7 9

centage of those are followers of Farrakhan. So secretive is the Nation of Islam that estimates of its membership range from 2,000 to 200,000.

The grandiose restaurant Salaam, built in a weary, run-down section of Chicago dominated by storefront churches, unkempt shops, and vacant lots, is by some accounts Farrakhan’s dream—he frequently visited the site during construction. It is a curiously ambitious project, since the only acclaimed food product previously produced by the Nation of Islam is its Salaam Bakery Supreme Bean Pie, prepared with navy beans, a favorite