What Takes a Meal from Good to Great? Electrolyte Tea
Certain touches take a restaurant meal from good to great. This week, five food-world people share their most memorable tales.
Peter Meehan has written about food extensively for The New York Times, but you may know him better for Lucky Peach, a publication he edits and co-founded. Among his strongest culinary memories are an unusual meal he had at Arzak, which put San Sebastián, in the Basque part of Spain, on the culinary map back in the 1980s. (The moral of the story: Sometimes it’s the caretaking that makes the meal.)
The first time I went to Europe I was 27 years old. My friend had moved [to San Sebastián] and was staging in the kitchen of Arzak. It’s a three-Michelin starred restaurant run by Juan Mari Arzak and his daughter Elena. Arzak is one of those godfathery types of modernist cuisine, and just kind of one of the best-loved chefs in the world, and especially in Spain. So I was very excited to go there. I’d never been to Europe and I’d never been to a Michelin-starred restaurant at that point. This was a very exciting opportunity. The third night I was in Spain I was going to go to Arzak, [but my wife Hannah and I] immediately both got food poisoning. I didn’t even know it yet but it hits my wife like a truck.
We don’t leave the apartment we were in for, like, 15 hours. She can’t eat anything, she can’t drink anything, we’re trying to watch Spanish television, we don’t speak any Spanish. It was raining and dark outside. It was horrible. But we were going to have dinner at Arzak that night. And I feel like the civil thing to do would have been to cancel and stay in and nurse my wife back to health, but it was at a time in my life when going to this restaurant was very important to me. I wanted to go, and she didn’t want to not go, so we get there and she’s trying to soldier through it, but it’s not gonna happen.
We see my friend Kevin, and Juan Mari welcomes us like we’re family he hasn’t seen for years. Close family that he loves very much. We go in the kitchen, we walk around, we see everything.
One thing is that Arzak doesn’t speak ANY English and I don’t speak any Spanish but it does not stop the affection and the welcome that we are getting. So we get to the table and I’m gonna order the tasting menu. She can’t have anything. She’s too sick to eat food. “I’m gonna have water,” and you know, no one has ever said that to Arzak. It invites a lot of third-degree questioning: “Are you a vegan?” (kind of like, “What’s your problem?”) “OK, you’re sick, well, we will make you consommé.” I started getting the tasting menu and I think they sent out some consommé and even that was too much for her to have.
And at this point Juan Mari comes out and he pulls a chair up to the table. We’re pantomiming to communicate. It was all hand signals. And I was like, “She’s too sick to eat, and she’s really sad about that. We’re disappointed.” And he was like, “no problem,” and he gets up and sprightly bounds off and he comes back 35 minutes later with his jacket on. And he had gone home (he lives pretty close to the restaurant) and he had gotten this stash of electrolyte tea which I think he drinks when he gets sick. So he proceeded to serve Hannah this menu of electrolyte teas to restore her strength because she was sick.
She had those to sip on while I was eating crazy modernist food. It was just so sweet. He totally helped her. She liked her tea service; it sustained her. It made it possible for her to [stay.] She was not having a gustatory experience, but that’s what she needed at the time. Juan Mari became kind of a friend that night. Turns out that he and his daughter Elena had gone to Robuchon or Bocuse, and the same thing happened to them: She got so sick she couldn’t eat somewhere, and they had the same experience where the chef took care of them. It was a more bonding experience than if we had all gotten drunk on sherry together.
