SOME FAVORITE CULINARY MOMENTS

Petersham Nurseries

My childhood English friend Gillian told me that she was certain I would love the food at the café and tea house at Petersham nurseries in the London Borough of Richmond. What she did not emphasize was the completely Mad Hatter’s tea party dining room in a huge old greenhouse, old country furniture, dirt floor, and huge white napkins. I immediately wanted to live there.

The food was just perfect seasonal ingredients cooked very simply and well.

Some of the most balanced cooking I had tasted since Zuni and Stars Cafés in San Francisco.

A rose water and petal infused Spanish sparkler that in the grey light and the rain pounding on the glass roof, was impeccable. The buffalo ricotta ravioli with sage and butter is seen everywhere, but this was the best.

Birthday Lunch at the Ledbury Restaurant, London, 2010

With only a day in London there was time only for lunch. At my favorite restaurant, The Ledbury.

No woodcock that year, but the ravioli of grouse was perfect.

Photo Courtesy of The Field

London’s Marylebone Market, The Ginger Pig, and Neal’s Yard Covent Garden.

On any visit to London, I live for a Sunday morning visit to the Marylebone market. For oysters shucked in the cold open air as I pull more cashmere around me, and then for the sublime sausage rolls from the adjacent Ginger Pig, hot and dripping from the oven. Do not scoff. These are one of the eating greats in London.

And if those are not available that morning because they have all been eaten, I am off to anything that the St. John bakery.

And egg salad sandwiches that are the benchmark.

As are the donuts from St John Bakery.

Le Comptoir, Paris, 2010

A very small bistro that was impossible to get into without months of advance notice. The menu, like Chez Panisse, changed every night with no choices. It was winter and one can sit outside since they provide lap blankets, but we were snugly inside. I hesitantly ordered the Lievre a la Royale which I never do since it is usually a gooey, smelly, mess of an uneducated sauce and dry hare leg. This was made into a galantine placed as a round slice in the plate and sauced with the real thing, the blood of the hare.

Fabulous.

A Montparnasse Oyster Bar

November 2010 I was in Paris with friends for my birthday. After a brilliant tour of the then new “Au Bon Marche” food hall in Paris, we walked over to Montparnasse to choose a place for lunch. It had to have good oysters.

In the grey winter wet is my favorite time to eat them.

Preferably in the sidewalk glass-covered part of a restaurant along a boulevard. We walked towards Montparnasse on our way either to Le Dome, La Coupole, or Le Select. Le Dome seemed to be the choice until I spotted some enormous langoustines.

On display at Le Bar aux Huîtres on the corner opposite Le Dome. As we four sat inches from the sidewalk, and I unfolded a huge, starched damask napkin on my lap, I knew I was home. Nothing for it but a bottle of Laurent-Perrier champagne as we tried to figure out what to eat from the mountainous bounty of shellfish that we had passed on the way in.

Langoustines for sure, and obviously the Belons. Not so obvious for me were the sea urchins after so many mediocre to downright nasty urchins. Hours out of the water from Iceland, they turned out to be the benchmark for the beast. The waiter told us not to hesitate. The Belongs were as good as any all of us had ever tasted, and the langoustines perfect. As was the mountain of house mayonnaise I ordered. Chablis Fourchaume, and then St Marcellin cheese with a bottle of Chinon. Just a light lunch. 360 Euros all in.

Three Geisha

A benchmark in hospitality service and hospitality is to be fed by three geisha in a 200+ year old dining room with the bill (courtesy of Japan Hotel and Restaurant Association) for the beef alone a dollar for every year that the inn was old.

The geisha had disrobed and re-clothed me in a 200-year-old kimono, told me how wonderful I was, then fed me nibbles of that ransom in beef, and three hours of rare tidbits that had even these hostesses who must have seen just about everything, wide eyed and dewy with sympathy at my ecstasy.

Before the lunch I had tea with the head priest of the Shinto religion. The same ranking, I assumed, as the Pope, but with much more of a sense of humor. He asked me about my family. “I am at a bit of a disadvantage,” I told him. “Since my family did not land in Massachusetts until 1620.”

His reply showed that, for him, North America and its Indians included Aztecs as well as the Mohicans. “Your ancestors,” he told me, “thought it an honor to have their chests split open by the obsidian knife. And then, for consuming the god still almost living, to have vultures and the sharpened teeth of the priests dig, sever, and tear the important organs and entrails And the other side of your family [Puritans] burned people at the stake. My family has been samurai for 2000 years [he owned the restaurant] but we never ate anyone, though certainly a lot of our enemies died in flames. Enjoy your lunch.”

White Bean Soup with Nightingales

It was not just the white bean soup with fresh black truffles prepared by George Blanc in Vonnas that has sustained a memory of 30 years.

It was that good, but it was the memory of late-summer nightingales singing in the bushes above the stream outside the dining room window next to my table that remains with me indestructibly.

As I sat by the window they started to sing, and as I was leaving, they ceased. I thought that Georges was genius enough perhaps to have recorded them somewhere and put speakers in the bushes.

He said he had not.

Sole with Crayfish at Chateau d’Yquem\

Of the lunch with Richard Olney and the two Lur Saluces owners of the chateau, again it is interesting to me what fixes a memory forever.

In this case it was not so much the perfectly fresh filet of Dover sole with a real and classical sauce Nantua paired exquisitely with a 30-year old Yquem, but the carafe of red wine on the table that was never touched.

With the cheeses we had a neighbor’s sweet white wine, so to this day I wonder what the owners of the world’s finest sweet wine drink for red, if they do. They have the money, so if they have any sense, it would be Petrus, even if it can no longer be the 1961 unless they are dining with its owner, Christian Moueix.

Brasserie Bofinger, Paris

Stunning were the two famous models eating their way through a “Plateau de Fruits de Mer Impérial,” larger than the Royale which I had never been able to finish even with four people at La Coupole.

This night it was Bofinger, and I was watching two models pick crab out of claws with impeccable Elizabeth-Arden red, long, nails and tuck the impaled crabmeat into the other’s carmined mouths. They were halfway through when we arrived and still enthusiastically unfinished when we left.

With customers like that one does not need décor.

Berowra Waters Inn, Sydney, Australia

Sometimes all one needs for decor to set the ambiance of a restaurant is the lack of it – especially if outside is a natural wonder or view that does not brook competition. Such that day was the Berowra Waters Inn, perched along the bank on the beautiful Hawkesbury River an hour north of Sydney, Australia and accessible only by seaplane or boat.

We had reserved on Sydney Seaplanes.

And then set off from the Regent Hotel to Double Bay in the harbor to climb aboard the single-engine plane. I had heard the story about four people who once came to a swishing stop at the dock only to have a massive row with the boatmen before flying off again since they had not told him that they didn't have a reservation. So, I had booked, confirmed the booking, and called from the harbor before leaving.

We were set.

I ignored the idea of how many sharks were waiting to have their own lunch of us should the one engine fail by pouring a magnum of Bolinger during the flight to my two guests.

“No worries,” the pilot told me, “we haven’t had an emergency landing in weeks.”

Worry I did until we walked up the gangplank of the dock, into the beautifully bare beige and white friendly restaurant to be greeted by a smiling, sun-burned face of the hostess, and whisked to a table holding another bottle of champagne. For the next three hours we ate the best of Sydney’s Rock Oysters, Balmain Bugs.

The bug.

Photo Courtesy of Saveur

Barramundi fish (Asian sea bass or giant sea perch), spiny lobster.

And then roast lamb.

Finally, it was time to leave, walk down to the plane in a glowing and very pink sunset, and not care a whit if the pilot could find his way back to Double Bay or not.

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