Food slut

People say great food is like great sex. But after two years of reviewing trendy restaurants, chatting with charming chefs, and indulging in fatted duck breast, I've lost my appetite.

By Ann Bauer

Read more: Writing, Life, Food and Travel

Jan. 2, 2006 | There's a scene in the 1971 film "Klute" in which Jane Fonda, playing an aspiring actress who supports herself as a prostitute, is in bed with a client, pumping away, moaning, calling him "baby," and then for one second her face changes, becoming ordinary and harried and mid-afternoonish, as she checks her watch behind the guy's head. Fonda was heralded for her performance, for showing with a single gesture how the high-class call girl must engage simultaneously in two activities. How her mind and body could be entirely divorced from each other. How sex becomes work.

I get it.

I'm a novelist, supporting my family as a food writer. A restaurant slut, purveyor of food porn, author of articles that liken sea scallops to blossoming roses and lamb tartare to velvet and tiny chocolate truffles to explosions that move in waves of flavor over the tongue. I've written at length about the briney, dark quality of raw oysters, the way they wriggle down the tunnel of the throat as if entering with intent. I've advised my readers to close their eyes and let the silken heft of whipped cream and mascarpone drizzled with banyuls fill their mouths. But even as I set down the words, I'm checking my watch.

I started in this business a little over two years ago. I'd just moved to Minneapolis from the East Coast, turned my first novel over to my publisher, and blown my entire advance on the down payment for a three-bedroom house. I needed a job. The local public radio-affiliated magazine needed a restaurant critic. It just happened.

And at first, it was great fun. I was coming out of a long quiet period: writing alone for hours each day. Now, I was going out three and four times a week, taking my friends, visiting places none of us could afford, ordering things I'd never heard of.

I schooled myself in wine basics and learned how to taste things -- analyzing flavors rather than swallowing them whole, picking apart the elements of a dish like one of those forensic computers can sort the strands of a substance into its component parts. I read everything I could find by Calvin Trillin and took a subscription to Saveur, a magazine that ran 10-page stories about topics like the origin of coffee.

Truth be told, food alone didn't rivet me. And I certainly was no chef. On nights when I wasn't dining out, I could be found in my kitchen dumping a block of frozen hamburger into a pan, turning the burner to high, and hacking at the meat until it was loose enough for me to mix with a couple of jars of spaghetti sauce. But food is linked to religion, history and culture. It defines ethnic groups, brings families together, and plays a role in the rituals around everything from holidays to executions. Jesus had his Last Supper, condemned men have theirs. For a novelist, this was rich stuff.

So I wrote stories about how fresh fish is sourced and shipped to the Midwest. About a slow-food chef who used only organic ingredients found within a 250-mile radius and a southern Minnesota farm that raised ducks humanely. A restaurateur whose caustic ad campaign caused picket lines to form. And a local line cook with bipolar disorder who burned through a dozen fine dining jobs before opening a Gothic-themed breakfast spot downtown.

But my signature was to interview people over dinner. It proved my theory that food is a platform upon which we build relationships and share confidences. Sitting knee-to-knee at a candlelit table, people would tell things they'd never revealed. Not shocking behind-bedroom-doors sorts of things, but facets of their stories no one had ever before heard. A famous conductor told me how his faith in God had shaped his music. A National Book Award winner admitted that she'd been surprised and frightened by her last pregnancy, at age 47.

I wrote traditional reviews, too, but I tended to avoid the places so hot only people who knew someone could get in. Restaurants opened to great fanfare, but I waited. Sometimes up to six months. And when I did visit I went casually, often without a reservation, sussing out the attitude of the wait staff toward unknown customers, pretending all the time it was my own money that was on the line. How would I feel if I'd hired a baby sitter, put on high heels for the first time in a month, and blown $200 on this meal?

Then Wolfgang Puck announced he was opening a restaurant at the newly expanded Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. So I flew out to California to interview him. It was the first week of January; back home, the temperature was below zero. But I was sitting in the courtyard at Spago in Beverly Hills. Over three utterly hedonistic hours, I was served a "taste" of everything Puck and his chefs could dream up: tiny pumpernickel blini with smoked salmon and caviar; French prawns in a fiery red-and-yellow curry; fatted duck breast studded with bacon, black truffle and dates.

Next page: I searched restaurants for just one warm, sensual, zaftig creature. But most nights, there was none