So I wrote this book called, 7 Controlled Vocabularies
and Obituary 2004-- the Joy of Cooking.
And I wrote it when I was at the Getty.
I was doing a book on Andy Warhol and the books he wrote.
And one of the women at the Getty
had come up with an object ID system, which
is a controlled vocabulary system that enables museums
to talk cross-platform, and to other institutions,
so that a "stool" in America is a "tabouret" in France,
and it enables them to just sort of communicate.
So anyway, so I did this book called 7 Controlled
Vocabularies and I wanted it to intersect
with a lot of elements of my life.
I didn't really want literature to be
something like, oh, a serious poetry book that I wrote.
I wanted to intersect with all the other things I was doing.
And one of the things I was doing at the time
was reading cookbooks.
I really like cookbooks.
I mean, I almost like reading cookbooks more than cooking.
But so I was-- so I stuck "the Joy of Cooking"
at the end of this thing.
And people always ask me, well, why did you do that?
And I really did it so that I could
increase the number of Google hits that the book would get.
But I was also writing a lot of Yelp reviews,
and this is one of my Yelp reviews.
It's about a restaurant called WD-50.
It's a conceptual food joint down in the Lower East Side.
And maybe I should stop after that.
I think I've run out of time and goodwill.
This is called "RPT MC-40 00.27 8."
"What is the relation between a fruit and a vegetable?
A book transpires one letter and then
one word at a time and nothing about reading
can prevent this from happening.
For this reason, books are best diluted,
or read over a good many years.
Only things that are consumed endure beyond their shelf life.
Nothing is really very different if you say it is.
I had dinner yesterday at WD-50, which
is a restaurant located where the Fukienese area of Chinatown
and the old pickle shops of the defunct Lower East Side
almost come into alignment.
The restaurant is located at 50 Clinton Street
and it has a post-Craftsman style decor with bulbous glass
lamps that look like fluorescent flower bulbs.
The chef's name is Wylie Dufresne.
He is young and he looks like a cowboy reincarnated
as a skateboarder.
His father Dewey is also a chef.
WD-50 is probably the only restaurant in Manhattan
that makes you hallucinate the food you are
eating while you're eating it.
The food can be quite un-foodlike.
I ate at the restaurant a few nights ago
and afterwards my taste buds felt incongruous and ecstatic.
I remember seeing something on another table that looked
like dessert and I ordered it.
A few moments later there were bonbon sized bits of pineapple
on a plate.
They had been soaked in something briny
and had become pickles.
Off to one side of the fruit was smeared
what looked like hot fudge sauce except that it
was made of ketchup and jalapeno peppers.
The sauce was semi-frozen.
The sauce was hot and cold and cold and hot.
I couldn't tell which.
I put the pineapple in my mouth and it
was like eating something that had been a vegetable.
The chef had sprinkled some salt scented
with what looked like dour chips of limes.
It was not really necessary to eat the food.
One could breathe it.
When I put all this in my mouth I
tasted so many things I forgot what was in my mouth.
Eating at WD-50 is like reading Proust backwards.
I looked over at a man at the table next to ours
and he had the face of a six-year-old.
The ideas of food erase the food itself
and then become the food you did not think you were eating.
Time passes inordinately or not at all.
What is it like to eat an idea or its suggestion?
As anyone who has eaten can tell you,
the most beautiful memories are memories that one
has forgotten how to have.
Eating at WD-50 is like having psychoanalysis
with a starch, a sugar, or a fat."