After a fine birthday meal last night at Masa, today opened on a far more somber note, with news that Johnny Apple is gone.
This was not a huge surprise to those who knew him; he had been in decline after a battle with cancer. But that doesn’t diminish the sense of loss. His talents were amazing, his breadth and depth of knowledge were irreplicable. The Times’ obit says the rest far better than I could, so better to read that:
[H]e was a natural role model, and his colleagues and competitors all watched what he asked, and what he wrote, and what and where and when he ate and drank, and they did their best to follow suit, albeit with much less apparent ease, capacity or zest. When, in an Indian restaurant in Uganda, he warned his dining companions, “No prawns at this altitude!,” they listened up.
Every food scribe has his or her own list of icons, writers whose talents are so profound that we can only hope to labor faintly in their shadows. It would not be too brash a statement to say he was mine — both for a writing style that shone with clarity, brevity and familiarity, and for the ability to transcend beats and turn his love for the finer things first into an avocation and ultimately into a vocation. His contemplations of wine and food always came in the context of the world at large, and vice versa; this, to me, was at the heart of the sheer brilliance of his writing.
Among my regrets is that I never managed to meet him, despite several attempts (the most recent this spring in Seattle). Aside from the usual sycophantic praise, I had at least one or two specific questions, mostly in the hope of confirming second-hand stories I’d heard about his gastronomic pursuits. Alas.
I think I’ll leave it there, and leave you with what remains my favorite (published) Apple story, about his 2002 road trip through Cajun country.
Billboards on every highway in Acadiana promote the boudin at this gas station or that grocery store. They are as common as kudzu. But we headed for Bonin’s, a butcher shop that has no need of billboards; it is the favorite of not only Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker writer, and James Edmunds, a certified New Iberia chowhound, but also Paul McIlhenny, the chief executive of the company that makes Tabasco sauce.
Others prefer the Best Stop Supermarket in Scott, which makes boudin with more liver and less heat, as well as chewy, pungent, cherry-red tasso; or Boudin King in Jennings; or Hebert’s in Abbeville.
Our rendezvous, housed in the simplest of white frame buildings, is the domain of Waldo Bonin, known as Nook, and his wife, Delores. It stands a few blocks from Shadows-on-the-Teche, the plantation where Bunk Johnson, the great cornet man, worked as a gardener. An out-of-date calendar hangs on the wall, and the glass-front meat cases are filled only with soft drinks.
These precise words were our road map down to New Iberia last year (a trip that, along with the story, prompted my nickname “Two-Lunch Bonné”; I never ranked three). We indulged at Boudin King and Best Stop, but we never found Bonin’s, despite inquiries with a half-dozen New Iberians from the local postman to the grocery clerk.
Its location? Perhaps that’s one of a thousand secrets Apple has taken with him to the great bistro in the sky.
[Update: The Times has expedited what is Apple’s last published piece, a list of “10 restaurants abroad that would be worth boarding a plane to visit.” Better, perhaps, to end on that auspicious note.]
It’s been busy times around here, editing our humongous