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Koons.
    He was a tad disappointed about missing the unsettling experience of eating live shrimp. “It freaks me out,” he told me. “You’re picking up an animal whose carapace has been stripped off by the chef. Its eyeballs are going back and forth on its eyesticks and it’s madly trying to swim away. Prawns don’t have a great deal of intelligence but they know when they’re going to die. You’re killing something with your teeth, and whatever the pleasure of that—and the flavor, I’ve got to admit, is incredibly, hedonistically sweet—it feels wrong. You’re not supposed to kill things with your teeth.”

Two
GRUB
    T he roots of extreme foodie-ism extend back to the beginning of the American gourmet industry, when squishy and swank were often one and the same. The business, which, in 2012, represented 10 percent of retail food sales and was worth nearly $86 billion, was built by a handful of largely forgotten European refugees on the backs of a menagerie of creatures most people in this country would gag to see on a plate of food.
    At first, the specialty-food trade was based on comforting people with the familiar. During World War II, as thousands of Jews fled Europe for the United States, Jewish importers, most of them working from offices on Hudson and Varick Streets in lower Manhattan, supplied other émigrés with items from home. Only when the salesmen began to penetrate the uptown carriage-trade shops and department stores newly devoting floor space to imported food in spiffy packaging, did the stuff become known as “specialty.” Mario Foah, who arrived from Naples in 1939, at the age of eighteen, got his start peddling panettone, a product from the north of Italy that was exotic to the southern Italians he was trying to sell to. Later, he diversified to cookies and candy. “It was strictly a Christmas business,” Foah, who is ninety-three, told me. “The rest of the year we managed by starving and eating samples from our suppliers.” Business was conducted in cash; according to one old story I heard, dealers kept their money in secret compartments in their shoes.
    Storytelling and salesmanship were inseparable, and an aura of personal sophistication proved useful. Ted Koryn was the quintessential New York food pitchman: small and suave, hilariously funny, fluent in four languages and conversant in a handful of others. He was born in Amsterdam to a wealthy family; only French was spoken in his grandmother’s dining room, and when his mother went out at night a maid had to stay up till she returned to help her undress. Left alone there during the war—his mother and stepfather had gone “on holiday” to the United States just before the Nazis invaded—he hid out on a boat with two friends, and slept in the boathouse at night. In 1942, his stepfather’s uncle was able to trade his art collection for exit visas, and Koryn rejoined his family in New York. There he signed on to a Dutch attachment to the Air Force and was trained in aerial photography at Yale.
    After the war, Koryn started a food business, selling mainly French products no one had ever heard of before, like Pommery mustard, Lu Biscuits, and Evian water (which never took off for him). His first wife, Miriam Metzger, was the daughter of Joe Metzger, who co-founded Dannon yogurt in the Bronx. (The company, which began as Danone in Spain and got its original yogurt cultures from the Pasteur Institute, struggled to connect with U.S. consumers until Miriam’s brother, Juan, suggested putting fruit in the bottom of the cup.) Koryn rode around Manhattan in a chauffeured limousine, and socialized constantly with an eclectic group of friends, from the cartoonist Will Eisner to the truffle-selling Urbanis and Xaviera Hollander, a former call girl who wrote
The Happy Hooker
. If he wanted someone to play poker with, he sent the car.
    Koryn traveled extensively