Le Stuffing

It begins with a discussion about trick journalism. It ends with a self-imposed dare to eat eight meals in two days, cooked by some of the world’s best chefs. I don’t even need to move. All I have to do is stay awake and hungry.

The Exquisite Corpse, a literarily named event Sept. 23 to Sept. 26 in New York run by the French food group Le Fooding, goes from Friday at 5 p.m. to Monday at 1 a.m.: 13 services in four-hour chunks of round-the-clock meals by high-end chefs from the United States and Europe.

I score a seat at eight of them — four on Saturday from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. and four more in the same time slot on Sunday, with a few hours on Saturday night to run home, take a shower and lament the dark circles beneath my eyes. Along with my camera gear and notebooks, I bring a Dopp kit and extra pressed shirts. On site, I take frequent catnaps in a back office set up for event staff and journalists, a space that rapidly takes on a locker room smell.

And yet, as much as my idea is a nutty one, I really don’t want this to turn into the haute gastronomie equivalent of a one-man hot dog-eating contest. With 13 high-end chefs from across Europe and the United States to strut their stuff, it is an opportunity to see a snapshot of the global food scene, warts and all.

When I walk through the door for the first time late that Friday night, I am confronted with a great communal table for 40 decorated with hundreds of candles in what is normally a Chelsea art space. I spot chef Fulvio Pierangelini, former chef at San Vincenzo, Gambero Rosso’s restaurant in Liverno, Italy. A chef’s chef and critic’s darling, Pierangelini simply walked into his venerated restaurant one day in 2009, looked around and realized his heart wasn’t in it anymore and simply closed the doors and walked away. Finito.

“Gastronomy is dead,” he laments. “There were more and more guests, but something was wrong. A restaurant is not a business. It’s a life, a necessity, a love affair.”

The man makes no effort to hide his disappointment. “I had the restaurant because I loved to cook. I just cook for myself, but there are always compromises,” he says, gesturing at a gobo light ad for a water brand projected on a wall and a foosball table covered with a champagne company’s logo. “I worked for 30 years but I don’t want to play the game anymore.”

From there, Pierangelini goes on to cook a meal that, despite a Holly Hobbie kitchen with a stove that can’t get hot enough to bring his vats of pasta water to a full boil, makes me wish every aspiring chef in the world would be required to spend a few months learning from him.

My first meal, however, is with Kobe Desramaults of Dranouter, Belgiuim’s In de Wulf restaurant. It is 1 a.m., the candles are blazing and there is a healthy buzz of a younger set excited to be part of the event.

The Belgian chef’s dishes present a peculiar start: A small bowl of green and brown fluids arrive — perhaps watercress oil and foie gras consommé? — and, almost concurrently, a canapé with cornichons and clover. Is it supposed to go in the soup? No one seems to know.

This is followed by poached oysters in whey sauce with hazelnut bits followed by salted beef charcuterie with little discs of raw root vegetables. They’re flops as exercises in texture. Who wants nuts in their mouth while they’re slurping oysters, or crunchy veggies interfering with melting charcuterie? But then there is a whiff of smoke from the kitchen and the chef and his helpers parade through the dining room great sauté pans lined with a nest of hay, cosseting a few aged, roasted pigeons, feet up — a trick I once saw Noma chef René Redzepi pull off with a suckling pig.

The pigeons are marched back into the kitchen and a few minutes later, the wait staff returns with individual servings of a tiny pigeon breast, cut into five bites. It’s smoky and gamy, with a pungency I’ve never tasted before — a taste worth the entire meal.

There’s a shift change, candles are reset and Frenchman Armand Arnal, as a result of flight troubles, has come directly from the airport for his shift, literally jogging into the space toting a giant cooler at 3 a.m. The guy should be applauded merely for his ability to put good food in front of 40 people at once while experiencing intense jet lag. He also creates a watermelon and candied ginger dessert with a basil coulis that’s like a crystal-clear snapshot of summer.

Things swing into high gear with, of all chefs, a Slovenian. While every other meal during the event is prepared by a chef and a crew of four or six, Ana Ros does it with just her husband. It’s 9 a.m. and few, if any, in the room have even heard of her, nor expect much until they taste her black cod with black truffle foam — which might be the single best dish of the weekend. The fish is flaky and flavorful and the foam is not a Ferran Adrià rip-off, but a creamy recipe from her grandmother.

Ros then comes out of the kitchen to say she’s “not much of a dessert person” before delivering a little marvel: goat’s milk ice cream, oven-baked figs and a tiny almond bar, all beneath a few juicy strands of candied lemon zest. It’s not until I take a scoop from the bottom of the bowl and my brain shorts out that I realize the surprise and beauty of the dish: There are black olives at the bottom of the bowl — tiny flecks of slightly dried, salty goodness. Matched against the tang of the ice cream, it’s a Roger Federer serve that writes your name in the air and an impossible Rafael Nadal return.

Those looking to know why chef Blaine Wetzel is cooking’s next big thing need to only see him pull out all the stops in New York later that evening as his large crew temporarily turns this Chelsea loft into Willows Inn East.

While most chefs confine their service to the kitchen, Wetzel brings the show to the floor, turning a pair of banquet tables at an end of the dining room into a great staging area where he and his crew hover like a team of doctors around an operating table, sending out course after course of his trademark dishes. There’s no way he doesn’t lose money on the venture.

“It’s a small world,” says English chef Sat Bains, explaining each chef’s desire to strut his stuff. “It’s a way to show what we can do.”

When Bains comes into the kitchen, things immediately go awry. A miscommunication with Le Fooding has left him without a soup course and he stalks around like an angry bull in the toy kitchen. His main course, however, is a mix of finesse and manly chutzpah — fine root vegetable puree and a beautiful wedge of roasted beef next to a crispy, fatty, chunky hunk of shredded oxtail that is perfect when downed with a glass of frappato and is shunned by the dieting crowd.

“Screw ’em,” says Bains. “Oxtail’s an unrenowned piece of meat and I want to give people a little taste of Nottinghamshire. I’m not here to create a storm, but hopefully I’m giving you a little slice of something.”

There are other highlights — a meal that’s a study in freshness from Mauro Colagreco of Le Mirazur restaurant in Menton, France, and Adeline Grattard’s steamed eggplant, coated in thin slices of charcuterie made from Bigorre pork belly. But my favorite meal just might be the one from the chef who doesn’t have a restaurant anymore.

For one of his first courses, Pierangelini creates a “sandwich” of branzino, foie gras and raw artichoke slivers, a dish that gives my neighbor at the table the giggles. For his pasta course, the Italian makes ravioli stuffed with tomatoes he has dried out overnight, concentrating their flavor, and on top, he drizzles olive oil, scatters flash-cooked ribbons of squid and sprinkles grated Parmesan.

In those two dishes, he covers simplicity, product primacy, ingenuity and flexibility. He’s completely negated his opening statement.

After 48 hours of near-constant eating, I crawl into a cab, head home and spend much of the next two days in a jet-lagged state. But I have stayed awake, hungry and tasted the work of some of the world’s best chefs.

Gastronomy is dead? I don’t think so.