Edible Stories by Mark Kurlansky

Author:Mark Kurlansky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Robert Eggle had never intended to spend his life as an utter fraud. In truth he couldn’t remember what he had intended but he was certain that this wasn’t it. After he had left Margaret everything snowballed unpredictably down the wrong slope because of two, probably bad, decisions. He determined that until he had a better understanding of things he (a) would not tell anyone that he suffered from amnesia and knew nothing of his past and (b) would not reveal to anyone that he had lost his sense of smell and could no longer taste anything—that is, if he ever had been able to taste, but he must have, because he had a sense of it being missing.

Robert Eggle’s new career began with the mystery surrounding his condition. At first, when dining with other people, because he seemed to find himself in some primitive culture where it was always necessary to comment on food, he limited himself to the observations for which he was qualified, such as “fibrous texture” or “a bread with the resilience of a marshmallow” or “a coldness that surprises.” Occasionally he would venture into his elemental taste buds, with “an underlying bitterness” or sweetness, sourness, saltiness. His comments were always different from those of other people, always a bit unexpected and—more and more, it became noted—interesting.

His restaurant career was not an intentional fabrication but a desperate attempt to cover up. Don’t many careers begin that way? Maybe this career was just one more thing he could not remember. When an interviewer erroneously stated that he had a restaurant in San Francisco, he did not have the slightest idea if he did or if he ever had, but he had learned to be a fast thinker and answered, “Used to.” Interviewers always assumed that there was some reason they were interviewing this man. He continued with that answer, wherever it was suggested that the restaurant was located, and soon became the most celebrated restaurateur in America without having the ability to recall if he had ever had a restaurant anywhere. When in New York it was in Austin, Texas. In Boston it was in Portland, Oregon; in San Francisco it was in St. Louis; and in Chicago it was in Palm Beach, Florida. He could have easily been exposed, but there was no reason to be suspicious. Remarkably he had only one close call, when a New York food writer decided to fly to Austin to check out his restaurant. Sadly, Chez Robert had just closed in Austin but was expected to reopen “in some months” in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Everywhere he went he had a celebrated restaurant somewhere else and the fact that it was not rated or reviewed in anybody’s food guide was further tribute to Robert Eggle’s famously iconoclastic nature. He shunned food critics.

He had stumbled across the secret to success. Only by being closed can you be trapped. The person who is open to everything has endless possibilities. So when he

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