Hungry E-Book

Jeff Gordinier

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 286

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the 2020 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards (ESTWA's) Travel Food & Drink Book of the Year. 'This smorgasbord of a tale will have travellers tasting every meal with renewed appreciation.' - National Geographic Feeling stuck in his life, New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier met René Redzepi, the Danish chef whose restaurant, Noma, has been repeatedly voted the best in the world. A restless perfectionist, Redzepi was at the top of his game but looking to shutter his restaurant and set out for new places, flavours and recipes. This is the story of their four-year culinary adventure. In the Yucatán jungle, Redzepi and Gordinier seek the perfect taco and the secrets of molé. On idyllic Sydney beaches, they forage for sea rocket and wild celery. On a boat in the Arctic Circle, a lone fisherman guides them to - perhaps - the world's finest sea urchins. Back in Copenhagen, Redzepi plans the resurrection of his restaurant on the unlikely site of a garbage-filled empty lot. Hungry is a memoir, a travelogue, a portrait of a chef, and a chronicle of the moment when daredevil cooking became the most exciting and groundbreaking form of artistry.

Leseprobe

“If you want to understand modern restaurant culture, you need to read this book. Gordinier takes us into the fabulously obsessive realm of the world’s most fascinating chef—and he does it with the voice of a poet. You will remember this every time you go out to eat.”

—Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums

“In Hungry, Gordinier invokes such playful and lush prose that the scents of mole, chiles and even lingonberry juice waft off the page.”

—Time

“A piece of writing as breathless and as urgent as its subject. Wonderful all-in, full-on storytelling. I read as I might eat a meal when I’m really, really hungry: all in one sitting.”

—Bill Buford, author of Heat

“Anyone who’s seen an episode of Parts Unknown knows what an adventure tracking down great food can be, but Jeff Gordinier knows it better than most…. [He] chronicles this journey with the practiced pen of a veteran journalist.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“This wonderful book is really about the adventures of two men: a great chef and a great journalist. Hungry is a feast for the senses, filled with complex passion and joy, bursting with life. Not only did Jeff Gordinier make me want to jump on the next flight (to Mexico, Copenhagen, Sydney) in search of the perfect meal, but he also reminded me to stop and savor the ride.”

—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

“Follow along on an incredible journey across the globe with the world’s greatest chef, described with equal parts humor and brilliance by one of the greatest food writers of our generation, as they go to enormous lengths in search of the rarest morsels of flavor in an imperfect world. In these pages, you will find that rare glimpse into the mind of a restless and enigmatic genius who has forever changed how we look at the world of fine dining.”

—Edward Lee, chef and author of Buttermilk Graffiti

“In these pages, Redzepi emerges as an enigmatic and contradictory figure … Gordinier makes a convincing case that Redzepi’s genius is irrevocably tied both to his relentless curiosity and to his compulsive need for change.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A remarkable portrait of Redzepi, the genius behind ‘the world’s best restaurant.’ … a remarkable portrait of Gordinier, a wise and reflective digester of Redzepi’s relentless creativity. Armed with a deep metaphorical gift, a gonzo enthusiasm, and a ‘palate quivering like a trampoline,’ Gordinier hurdles us across the globe along with Redzepi and his merry pranksters in search of, among other things, a Mexican mole sauce ‘like an epic poem about history and time.’ … A book to be cherished not just by anyone who’s dreamed of eating at Noma, but by anyone who’s ever had a dream.”

—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“A pithy, fluid, rollicking book that’s somehow simultaneously visceral and cerebral, funny and heartfelt, passionate and badass, brilliant and unpretentious—Gordinier takes us along with him on a madcap global odyssey on the heels of a megalomaniacal genius of a chef as he relentlessly pushes the boundaries of food. This is a book about invention and reinvention—of food, ideas, place, and ultimately the self. It’s immensely fun to read as well as profound. I loved every word.”

—Kate Christensen, author of The Epicure’s Lament

“For the curious culinary traveler and food-industry insider, this will become mandatory reading. With rich, compelling detail, the story traces René Redzepi’s path to carving out his own radical space in modern cooking, but what’s most wonderful about this book is the heartfelt parallel story—the story of Gordinier’s own personal evolution, following the chef around the world and finding himself forever changed.”

—Lindsey Tramuta, journalist and author of The New Paris

“A vivid picture of the complex, almost messianic 41-year-old Danish chef and the cast of eccentric, talented characters who are drawn into his world.”

—Adam Platt, Grub Street

“This smorgasbord of a tale will have travelers tasting every meal with renewed appreciation.”

—National Geographic

Included in:

The Must-Read Books of Summer 2019, Town and Country

Best Summer Reads of 2019, Daily Beast

12 Travel Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down This Summer, National Geographic

Our Favourite Summer Reads of 2019, Outside

In memory of Jonathan Gold,

who showed us the road

&

for Lauren,

who showed me the way home

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

—DANTE ALIGHIERI, canto 1, The Divine Comedy

Dreamer,

If you are like me,

you jump anyway.

—JASON REYNOLDS, For Every One

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphPart One:Pulled UpMexicoCopenhagenMacedoniaThe BronxPart Two:Burning Down the HouseCopenhagenSydneyCopenhagenNorwayPart Three:Houses in MotionOaxacaMéridaTulumEpilogue:This Must be the PlaceCopenhagenAcknowledgmentsIllustrationsCopyright

Part One

PULLED UP

Mexico

I WAKE UP WITH SAND IN MY MOUTH AND A GLARE IN my eyes. A man is speaking Spanish and waving a flashlight. I try to remember where I am and the details wobble into place, like a wraith making its form more visible. I hear the lapping of waves. I grope around for my backpack and my shoes. I arise from slumber on a dark beach in Tulum, the Mexican resort town. That body of water a few yards away is the Caribbean.

I have been dropped here in the middle of the night at a languorous caravansary called Nueva Vida. Unable to locate my cabana, and unable to find anyone who could provide me with a key to the cabana, lost in the darkness and bereft of a phone signal and exhausted by a day that has involved a morning flight from Mexico City to Oaxaca, lunch in Oaxaca, the tour of a sprawling marketplace in Oaxaca, dinner in Oaxaca, significant quantities of mezcal, a flight from Oaxaca back to Mexico City, another flight from Mexico City to Cancún, and then a three-hour drive through the Yucatán Peninsula to this yoga-matted magnet for man-bun-and-matcha devotees, I have surrendered to fatigue and fashioned an al fresco bed for myself in the dunes. I am within spitting distance of a sanctuary where sea turtles clamber up on shore to lay their eggs.

The man with the flashlight turns out to be merciful—at least as soon as he realizes I am not there to interfere with the sea turtles and their ancient rituals. I pour the sand out of my shoes and grab my backpack and the man leads me to a stark white room with a sea breeze ghosting the curtains and a canopy of mosquito netting over the bed. Never has a bed looked more inviting. I climb in and try to sleep, but it’s only a matter of minutes before sunlight starts asserting itself through the doorframe. The only choice I have is to greet the day.

I have landed here in Tulum because of the stubborn coaxing of a man named René Redzepi. Within the close-knit world of global gastronomy, Redzepi is a figure whose influence might be compared to that of David Bowie’s in music in the 1970s, or Steve Jobs’s in technology in the 1980s, or Beyoncé’s now. He is the chef behind Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen that has—for those who follow and chronicle these things—changed the way people think about food. Writers have a habit of referring to Noma as the best restaurant on earth. That may or may not make Redzepi, by hyperbolic extension, the greatest chef alive.

It is not every day that one is summoned to coffee by a cultural figure of that stature, but just such a twist of fate came to me one winter afternoon in 2014. I was working as a food writer on staff at The New York Times when an email arrived in my clogged in-box from Peter Tittiger, an operative at Phaidon, the publishing house that had put out Redzepi’s cookbook and journal—books that were studied and parsed by chefs the way that songwriters and rock scholars had once geeked out on lyrics and liner notes. Redzepi wanted to meet me.

My inclination was to say no. I can’t explain why a food writer from the Times would feel compelled to decline a face-to-face conversation with a man reputed to be the greatest chef alive, but the older I get, the more I find it liberating to say no. Most of the existing self-help literature seems to nudge us in that direction, doesn’t it? Learn how to say no. But really I was just busy. There were multiple deadlines to juggle, there were staff meetings to endure, there were baseball games and piano recitals and family dinners to race home to. Some part of me thought, God help me, this Danish guy is going to hector me for two hours about the principles of the New Nordic movement. The New Nordic movement was the culinary juggernaut out of Scandinavia that claimed Redzepi as its chieftain. In 2004, Redzepi and his comrades, like agents of some French surrealist collective, had released a gastronomic manifesto, outlining the rules and aspirations that would govern their cooking in the years to come. Among its objectives were “to express the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics we wish to associate with our region,” and “to promote animal welfare and a sound production process in our seas, on our farmland and in the wild.” In the early phase of his kitchen career, as the journalist Tienlon Ho has written:

Redzepi was expected to fall in line with his mentors and cook French classics, and for a while he did. Soon, though, Redzepi had the epiphany that his food should not only be made with but entirely shaped by what he found in the forest, on the beach, and in the hands of local farmers. In practice, this meant that berries ripe for a mere two weeks a year and plucked by a Swedish farmer uninterested in selling them were more luxurious than imported caviar; he served them in a bowl with minimal adornment. He made terroir—the soil, the climate, and the land that shape the flavor of the plant and the animal that eats it—more than jargon. He made it the entire point of his cuisine.

The impact of these ideas had escalated during half a decade, moving from the margins to a position of pulsing centrality. Pretty soon the de facto boondoggle for an American food writer was a trip to Copenhagen to go foraging on the beach with Redzepi, nibbling inquisitively on snatches of scurvy grass and sorrel, bellflowers and beach mustard. “Denmark, after all, isn’t Provence or Catalonia,” Frank Bruni wrote after one such reverie on the dunes. “For a locavore chef, in particular, it has limitations. But Mr. Redzepi has air-dried, pickled, cured, foraged and researched his way around them. He has taken what could be a set of ankle weights and turned them into wings, his culinary accomplishments drawing all the more regard for the degree of geographical difficulty built into them.”

Inspiring stuff. Noble stuff, especially for a planet on the brink of ecological catastrophe caused, in part, by the industrial rapacity built into our food supply. I just wasn’t in the mood. My marriage was falling apart. Two weeks earlier I had moved out of the house where my two children lived. Depression rolled into my days like a toxic fog. On a cold day in February I didn’t think I had the patience to conjure up a rictus grin of pretend curiosity while I listened to a visionary from Copenhagen prattling on about his manifesto.

Making things even more complicated, I had sort of made fun of Redzepi’s ethos in the pages of the Times, even though, up until that point, I had never spoken with the man or eaten his food. In the winter of 2014, Noma’s influence was running rampant in New York City, with restaurants like Aska, Acme, Atera, and Luksus promulgating their own interpretations of the New Nordic ideas that were spreading outward from Copenhagen like invasive scurvy grass. Nordicness was the new hotness and that made it a ripe target for dismissal. Noma veterans had begun colonizing the city, smoking everything with hay and garlanding plates with kelp and edible sidewalk sprigs. The chef at Acme, Mads Refslund, had even founded Noma with Redzepi—the two cooks had come up together in culinary school—while the chef at Luksus, a bearded Nova Scotian philosopher named Daniel Burns, had been the pastry chef at Noma for a few years. Merely having the name Noma on your résumé seemed to entice investors to throw money at you. Everybody wanted in—except me. Up until that winter, I had not eaten in any of those restaurants. I didn’t want to. My life was a mess. I felt adrift and I sought comfort in hot bowls of cacio e pepe—starch and cheese. I wanted dumplings and bibimbap and shawarma. What did I not want? As I wrote then, “For months, I dodged the question. Now and then someone would tap me on the shoulder and ask for an opinion on the latest New York restaurant that embodied the spirit of the New Nordic movement. Had I nibbled on any lichen lately? Had I dunked my spoon into a brimming bowl of barley porridge speckled with globules of pig’s blood, sea buckthorn and the fermented scales of a creature found in the deepest crevasses of a fjord? The answer was no, but I felt too much shame to admit that.”

I was reluctant to rendezvous with this Redzepi character. My state of mind made me allergic to posturing of any sort, and I had snarked off the guy’s precious movement in the world’s most influential newspaper. I braced myself for a dressing-down akin to the notorious Ned Beatty scene in Network. I imagined Redzepi scowling as he leaned across some faux farmhouse picnic table at a Greenwich Village caffeine dispensary and yelling, “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature!”

Nevertheless I said yes. It was better, I figured, than milling around the office. And saying yes to the primal forces of nature, as I would come to learn during the following four years, was what René Redzepi was all about.

Suffice it to say that the man who walked through that door in downtown Manhattan was not what I had expected. Of all the gifts that human beings are born with or learn to develop, charisma has to be the most mysterious. Several things about Redzepi struck me right away: (1) His command of English was better than that of most Americans. (That singular advantage had obviously helped him in getting across his message to British and American food media. Now if you told me that he actually spoke twenty-five languages, I would not be shocked. I’m guessing he could negotiate a meal in at least seven.) (2) He seemed to be personal friends with half the chefs in New York. (3) Like me, he didn’t want to talk about his movement, or any movement, or at least he appeared to have grown weary enough of the topic that there would be no Moses-on-the-mountaintop soliloquies about the soul-nurturing ecstasies of foraging while I counted the minutes until I could catch the Metro-North express back to my sad, cramped, post-separation apartment in Westchester County.

No, it turned out that Redzepi wanted to talk about tacos. This brightened my day. As a kid in Los Angeles, I had grown up on tacos. In fact, something about Redzepi struck me as temperamentally Californian. I was taken aback by this. He disarmed me with an easy laugh and a sort of barefoot-on-the-beach demeanor that seemed antithetical to his status as an avatar of stark Scandinavian mission statements as well as his reputation as a restless, hot-tempered taskmaster in the kitchen. As I would come to learn, Redzepi’s identity as a Dane didn’t conform to some Viking stereotype. Growing up in Copenhagen, he had been a migrant kid. His mother, Hanne, was a Dane who had worked cleaning houses and hospitals, but his father, Ali-Rami Redzepi, was a Muslim and ethnic Albanian from Macedonia who had sought citizenship in Denmark to get a foothold as a cabdriver and fishmonger. When Redzepi was a boy, his father had shepherded him and his twin brother to sleep by reading passages from the Koran by their bedsides. The family had endured the constant grind of bigotry from anti-immigrant Danes. Sometimes Redzepi and his brother had gone to bed hungry. The seed of the New Nordic movement could be found in his desire to subvert the Danish establishment, not to enshrine it. By now he came across as the food world’s consummate insider, but, as so often happens, what had gotten him there was an outsider’s hunger to rise up and take charge.

Anyway, Redzepi had an idea. It seemed innocuous. It seemed impossible, too, or at least unlikely to lead to anything real. The years to come would teach me that Redzepi was always dreaming up ideas. These ideas usually came across as impossible, and their very impossibility fueled him.

“We should go to Mexico,” he said.

“Sure, sure …”

I humored the guy for a while in that coffee shop on Greenwich Street, but I never believed that Redzepi and I were destined to head south of the border, no matter how contagious his enthusiasm. I listened and let my thoughts drift.

Mexico. Right. “Yeah, man, that would be cool.” I murmured something like that—something noncommittal. I detected a rising intensity in his voice, a feverish élan that called to mind Peter O’Toole before he set out to make his sprightly slog across the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. Was I being summoned? Was I being inducted into a cult? Did Redzepi, his brown eyes unblinking and trained upon me, sense that my depression made me vulnerable? How was I going to break it to this Danish chef that slashed-to-the-bone media budgets meant that I might never find an editor willing to pay for this trip? Why even try?

I figured I’d just go back to the office and let this electric Kool-Aid taco quest of a whim gather dust in the cobwebbed cellar of my Gmail account. Little did I realize that Redzepi viewed the word “no” as a minor impediment—no more of an obstacle than the buzzing of a mosquito, barely worth a swat. His brain appeared to be missing synapses that would help ferry “no” to the proper cognitive checkpoints. Maybe he had an enzyme that blocked it. Later, after we met, he emailed me. He texted me. He reassured me. He kind of badgered me.

This was going to happen, he said. I just needed to get an editor on board. I needed to find a way.

Redzepi raised a glass of Farolito mezcal, and everyone at the table followed suit.

“Viva Mexico!” he said.

My plane had landed in Mexico City maybe an hour ago. It was a Tuesday night in May and I was here with Sean Donnola, a photographer. We weren’t sure what we’d gotten ourselves into. A schedule had been emailed to us, but I figured it must be some kind of best-case-scenario itinerary—clearly it would be impossible to visit that many places and eat that many meals in the course of a few days. On the runway at the airport I’d switched on my phone and received a text from Redzepi instructing me to come straight to Pujol, which many critics considered to be the finest restaurant in Mexico City, if not the whole country. Do we have a reservation? Will they hold our table if we’re running late? Donnola and I blearily walked into Pujol and were whisked directly to a round table where Redzepi was holding court.

The first surprise sat across from Redzepi at the table. Danny Bowien was a rising star of cooking in New York and San Francisco—born in South Korea but adopted by a white family in Oklahoma, he’d given up playing guitar in a Christian indie-rock band and forged a reputation as the chef behind Mission Chinese Food, where the specialty was psychotropic, palate-stinging Sichuan dishes that roared to your table with a wok breath that was practically nuclear. It turned out that Redzepi had become a kind of mentor to Bowien. Donnola and I had no idea that he’d be there, but for our purposes it was a nice twist. The second surprise was that Redzepi wasted no time in copping to his initial ignorance about Mexican food.

As we sat down he told me that he remembered working in the kitchen at the French Laundry, which had been the Noma of its moment in the 1990s and early 2000s—the Napa Valley atelier where the chef Thomas Keller abracadabraed California produce into a kind of Fabergé opulence. One day in 2000, a van pulled up outside. The guys in the van were selling tamales. Redzepi declined. “I was, like, ‘I don’t want Mexican food right now,’” he recalled with wistful regret. “I just didn’t know what it was.” His understanding, or lack thereof, was based on what he’d grown up encountering in Denmark. “I’ll be honest with you, back then my idea of Mexican food was what we have in Europe, which is like a bastardized version of Tex-Mex. Everything’s terrible. It’s grease, it’s fat, it’s big portions. That was my impression. I didn’t know what it was. I had no idea. I had no idea there was such a big Middle Eastern influence in the food. Shreds of grilled meat right off the flame. I had never heard of nixtamalization before.”

Later on, after Redzepi had founded Noma, a chef named Roberto Solís came to work in the kitchen. The two men became friends, and their friendship continued even after Solís moved back to Mérida to open a restaurant called Nectar. Working night and day to make Noma into a restaurant of international significance may have been rewarding on the surface, but it began turning Redzepi into an angry husk of a human being, charred and brittle, and one day Solís offered a temporary cure: an invitation to come visit him in Mexico, eat some tacos, hang out. Redzepi, as is his style, said yes, but the trip was taxing enough to make him doubt his judgment. He caught flights from Copenhagen to Amsterdam to New York to Houston to Mérida. “It was one of those stupid trips,” he said. “I was just so tired and bummed out.” By the time he reached this Mayan stronghold on the Yucatán Peninsula, Redzepi was ready to pass out. But he had to eat something first.

Solís took his friend to a place called Los Taquitos de PM. The unlikeliness of this was hilarious. Los Taquitos de PM was not some delightful hideaway tucked into a cobblestoned alleyway where an abuelita stirred pozole in a cast-iron pot. Los Taquitos de PM was tacky as hell—garish—with plastic chairs and corporate cola signs and the sort of lighting that induces migraines and instant hangovers. Redzepi was about to alter the course of his life, but at the moment when he spied Los Taquitos de PM along the side of a bleakly unromantic thoroughfare, he thought he had made a mistake in hauling his ass to this part of the world.

His resistance intensified when he caught his first glimpse of the food. Solís ordered three plates of tacos al pastor. In the dish, shavings of pork, stained red after being bathed in a chili sauce with achiote and other spices, are sawed off a trompo—a spinning vertical skewer—and layered on corn tortillas with threads of pineapple on top. Lebanese immigrants helped to give birth to the dish when they brought shawarma to Mexico, which means that tacos al pastor qualify as a unique example of Mayan-Hungry. Caribbean–Middle Eastern fusion. But all you need to know is that when most lovers of Mexican food spy a trompo in the marketplace, these tacos are what they crave.

Redzepi didn’t. Pineapple? he thought. “I was so skeptical when I saw that,” he said. “Like a bad pizzeria.” Hunger can lead to breakthroughs, though. Redzepi pinched a taco between his fingers and took a bite. “That first mouthful. Soft. Tasty. Acidic. Spicy. It’s like when you have sushi and it’s great for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. And my virginity was taken. In the best possible way. That was the moment.”

By the time I crossed paths with him in Mexico City, his fleeting taco bliss had morphed into an obsession. Redzepi had been back to Mexico more times than he could count. He returned again and again with his family to recharge his engines and flee the pewter-skyed, bone-chilling Danish winters. “I was burned out,” he’d written in his journal.

Success is a marvelous thing, but it can also be dangerous and limiting. Suddenly we’d become a fine-dining establishment and had begun listening to questions about whether we needed real silverware, or if the waiters should wear suits. Like the food would improve with a bow tie. Those things had never been important to us; we’d always put all our efforts into people and creativity, not commodities. One month in Mexico and I’d realized the truth—I was scared, scared of losing the precious worldwide attention we’d stumbled into. All of us were. We were too worried about what people expected of theso-called “world’s best restaurant,” rather than focusing on what we expected of ourselves. We had stopped following our natural instincts and trusting that our memories are valuable enough to shape our daily lives at the restaurant. I won’t let questions like that distract us anymore.

Mexico was where he could see clearly, and the complexity of Mexican cuisine—the corn, the chiles, the fruits, the edible insects, the sharp differences from region to region—haunted him like a love affair whose memory he couldn’t shake. He needed to come back to these flavors.

And here at Pujol, where chef Enrique Olvera raised Mexican cuisine to a new form of edible narrative, Redzepi watched and tasted everything in a fugue state of anticipation and reaction. Of all the dishes and ingredients that captivated him, nothing in Mexico cast more of a spell than mole. What is mole? Well, maybe it’s more useful to ask what mole isn’t and even then you’ll wind up stumped. The ingredients that merge within it represent all of the cultures that have clashed to form what Mexico is: the indigenous people who occupied the land first, the European invaders who forced their way in, the immigrants from the Middle East and Africa and Asia. Often lazily viewed by gabachos as simply a sauce, or a sauce made with chocolate—mole poblano, which is but one of countless strains—“mole” is ultimately a word used to link a fellowship of sauces. There are so many varieties with so many ingredients in so many household interpretations across that it’s fruitless to think about tracking them all. Studying mole is like studying the subatomic realm: The quest goes on and on.

This multiplicity is exactly what drew Redzepi in. The cuisine of Denmark had nothing resembling mole. He wanted to figure out how it worked. Doing so was impossible, which was why he wanted to try. Redzepi was like Glenn Gould going granular with Bach’s counterpoint and wondering how he could unravel its coils of DNA by slowing it down, or pulling it apart, or flattening it, or turning it sideways. In the following three years Redzepi would return to mole with the determination of a mathematician, the diligence of a yogi.

It turned out he had brought me here to Pujol because he was friends with Enrique Olvera, but also because if a person had a passion for mole, this was the place to be. Olvera’s mole stood as the pièce de résistance. It was the mole that ruled them all. It was an epic poem about history and time. The mole at Pujol reverberated with layers of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, star anise, almonds, pecans, peanuts, onion, thyme, oregano, marjoram, dried chilhuacle rojo chiles, dried chilhuacle amarillo chiles, plantains with the skin on, and heirloom tomatoes, but even that litany of components didn’t capture what it tasted like, because mole was the game that moved as you played, the answer that was always in flux, sauce as quantum physics. As Olvera would explain it, “The recipe adapts to seasonality and the ingredients change accordingly. It might have hazelnut or almond or macadamia or a mix of all three. The same is true for the tomatoes, the fruits, even the chiles. All of the ingredients, regardless of the season, are toasted in a comal, a heavy cast-iron griddle, in order to avoid the heaviness that often accompanies a mole with fried ingredients. They are then ground in a stone mill: first the fruits, then the spices, the nuts, and the chiles. The new paste is then cooked and the old mother mole is fed with it. What’s truly remarkable is that it changes every day it is reheated. It can be fruit-forward and bitter or spicier and nuttier. Since the mole is an ever-changing universe in itself, we present it without animal protein and instead just with a fresh tortilla and some sesame seeds.”

In other words, this was a mole so profound and delicious that Olvera and his kitchen crew did not even serve it on top of or underneath a piece of meat. They served it by itself: sauce on a plate. Imagine a French chef bringing you a plate of Dover sole meunière without the fish—simply the buttery liquid itself and a basket of bread. But beyond the surrealism of that gesture, Olvera’s boundary pushing with the tradition of mole took on an extra ingredient that could be tricky and fickle: time. Instead of making a new batch of mole madre every few days, the cooks at Pujol kept adding more to the original pot. The first iteration of the mole joined the second version of the mole and then they both joined the third interpretation of the mole and on and on and on, for weeks on end, with new ingredients making their acquaintance with old ingredients and all of the old ingredients aging and deepening and acquiescing with the passing of time. The mole changed, the seasons changed, we changed, you changed—is this a restaurant dish or a passage from the Bhagavad Gita? “When I tried it the first time, I had goose bumps,” Redzepi told me. By now, Olvera himself—bearded and grinning, possessed of a Lebowski-like calm as he ambled around the dining room—had sidled up to our table. “Enrique,” Redzepi asked him, “how old is the mole?”

“Three hundred and seventy days,” Olvera said.

“See what happens,” Redzepi said.

At each place setting there was a plate and on each plate was a circular spill of mahogany sauce. Within that round splash was a smaller circle of rust-colored sauce. It looked like a work of abstract art—a study in earthen hues. “It’s the eye of Sauron,” Redzepi said. “There isn’t a Danish designer from the fifties who wouldn’t have an orgasm looking at this.” You didn’t want to wreck such a stunning visual, but you could not resist. Devouring it couldn’t have been simpler: You grabbed the tortillas and slowly (or quickly, if you were famished) swiped the aged compound of flavors away. We ate silently, as if taking communion. “Don’t be ashamed to ask for more tortillas,” Redzepi said. “Everybody does it.”

His mind reeled. “Guys,” he said. “Let’s think of what’s happening here. You’re taking a pancake. And you’re dipping it into a sauce. If you went to Per Se and you dipped a pancake into a sauce? There’s something going on here….”

By the time I joined Redzepi in Mexico, I was deep into my walking trance. There are wooded areas of Westchester County, New York, that I now know so well, after years spent traversing them on foot, that I can summon each downed tree trunk in the Google Maps of my mind. What I did as my marriage unraveled felt “healthy” only in the sense that it involved exercise. I would walk for three or four hours at a time. What was unhealthy was the way that my constitutionals formed ruts in my brain, both symbolic and actual. On these walks back and forth along the Hudson River and through the grounds of old Gilded Age estates and up hills into suburban neighborhoods where all manner of Updikean mischief had gone down, I worked over my mistakes and longings with the monotony of a penitent monk. I gnawed on my guilt like jerky. I replayed scenes of heartbreak like an airplane movie stuck on a loop. I replayed the look on my wife’s face when I’d told her, one night, that we would no longer sleep in the same bed. I replayed the feeling of the tears of my children seeping through my jeans as they rested their heads on my lap and I told them that Dad was moving out of the house for a while. I walked north and then south, or south and then north, pretending that I was vaporizing my fuckups—burning them off step by step—when in fact I was only digging them in deeper.

My strolls were getting me nowhere. If anything, they qualified as a form of sleepwalking—like a marathon that takes place on a Möbius strip. I have a tendency toward obsessive behavior. That has paid dividends in my career as a journalist—hungrily trying to learn everything about music or food or poetry can turn even an autodidact into an expert—but it can stymie my ability to move forward in life. I linger, I stall. Redzepi, in contrast, was all about moving forward. When it came to escaping from ruts, the guy was Houdini. While I would nearly carve a furrow into the ground by walking the same stretch of trail for months at a time, Redzepi’s neural pathways appeared to have an insatiable appetite for fresh data. For new people, too. His international network of contacts was always expanding.

You could tell when you had been chosen. Your phone would ping. The sound was like the peal of a bell. “Hey buddy,” the text would say. There was something being asked of you and there was something being given. Being asked was the gift—being summoned to join the cause. Being asked meant that Redzepi had recognized some talent in you, and he sensed, maybe, that this light of yours could help illuminate the pathway forward. The club was a band of believers, sisters and brothers united in excellence—not merry pranksters, not a ragtag assemblage of misfits or whatever the going chef stereotype used to be, but a fierce, focused crew, akin to the NASA ground-control team in Apollo 13. If Redzepi was texting you, it meant that he thought your input was valuable. If he was texting you, it meant that you were valuable, or at least it felt that way.

I began to view his method as a form of Tom Sawyer–ing. Redzepi was a tech-savvy version of the namesake character in Mark Twain’s novel, somehow persuading passersby to join him in the painting of a white picket fence, pro bono, because to paint a white picket fence was to pursue a noble cause. You were beautifying the community,