My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  We flew to London on a cheap charter flight (I think our tickets cost $150, round trip), then took a train to Manchester, where Martin’s parents lived. I then went off to Paris on the boat-train by myself for three days. Martin met me there and we took the overnight train—the Orient Express!—to Trieste, traveling in second-class couchettes. Trieste was the Italian gateway to Yugoslavia, but that’s not why we stopped there. I had unfocused aspirations to be a filmmaker in those days, and had invented an imaginary production company, given the dubious credibility of business cards and letterhead, called Serrano Films, Ltd. (a reference to my days at the Serrano Gay Bar). On this letterhead, at some point, solely out of idle curiosity, I had written for information to the organizers of Trieste’s annual Science Fiction Film Festival, and received by return mail, to my considerable surprise, a letter offering me a free pass for two to the event, with complimentary hotel accommodations and meals for a week included. It would have seemed churlish not to accept.

  The festival installed us at the Albergo Corso, a comfortable old hotel with creaky floors and warm wood paneling and bathrooms down the hall, and gave us meal vouchers good at several local trattorias. Our favorite became the Birreria Forst, where we had repeated meals of insalata mista, pasta with livery meat sauce, and Italian lager. Martin spoke some Italian, of course, and ordered for us. I sat there pretty much in a daze, at least for the first few days, not quite believing that I was in a real Italian restaurant, in Italy, surrounded by Italians. The festival screenings were alfresco affairs in a big courtyard at the Castello di San Giusto, on a hill overlooking the city. We saw Russian space epics, Belgian ghost stories, American monster movies, and a Czech fantasy called Who Wants to Kill Jessie, in which speech balloons appeared over the heads of live-action characters. In between screenings, we’d cool ourselves with ice cream bars sold by wandering vendors or order salami sandwiches and half liters of cheap wine from the castle caffè, sitting under a grape arbor that I was inordinately impressed to notice had bunches of real grapes on it, not the plastic ones that restaurants back in Los Angeles had.

  When the festival was over, we backtracked to Venice, where my uncle Paul, who worked for an advertising agency in Manhattan handling travel accounts, had arranged to have us put up for free for a week at the Quattro Fontane, a rambling resort hotel on the Lido, which seemed part California guest ranch and part Alpine chalet. Venice stunned me. As much as I’d read about it, as many pictures as I’d seen, I couldn’t quite completely grasp that most of the streets really were water, and that all that decorative sugar frosting on the buildings was stone, and very old. The Quattro Fontane was nice enough, but we spent most of our time in the city itself, taking the vaporetto from the Lido to the Piazza San Marco every morning and prowling around endlessly, getting intentionally lost down narrow alleyways smelling of cat urine and espresso, which sometimes ended abruptly at water’s edge but sometimes opened into beautiful little squares where children kicked a soccer ball around and old men sat on benches in the sun playing cards. We ate in pizzerias or fixed-price student places, went to every museum and art gallery we could find, and allowed ourselves one coffee a day at one of the expensive caffès in the shadow of the Campanile. Back at our island hotel each night, we’d dine on cold antipasto and grilled fish or veal, sipping from a bottle of wine that, as inconceivable as this is to me now, we never quite finished at one sitting (they’d mark it and save it for our next meal).

  Then, finally, Yugoslavia. After our week in Venice, we boarded a Jadrolinija steamer, with a big red star on its smokestack, rented a couple of wood-slat deck chairs, and settled back as we headed down the Dalmatian coast toward Dubrovnik, along the way passing towns of sand-colored stone buildings with red-tile roofs, isolated green-shuttered villas surrounded by tall trees, rocky coves and shrub-covered islets, and in the background endless barbicans of barren gray karst cliffs.

  Our arrival in Dubrovnik was less than auspicious. A museum bookshop colleague of mine in L.A. knew a Croatian woman named Rose, who worked at the Bank of America in Beverly Hills. When he learned that I was going to Dubrovnik, he introduced us, and Rose told me that her grandmother had some vacation cottages for rent in an ideal location on the edge of the city. We gave her our dates, and she made reservations for us. I had visions of a charming little bungalow with whitewashed walls and a terrace looking out over the wine-dark Mediterranean. Disembarking from the boat, we found a taxi driver and gave him the address that Rose had given us—Kraljevića Marka Ulica, Prince Mark Street. He looked at us blankly. There was no such thoroughfare, he assured us. We asked to be taken to the local tourist office instead. They were as puzzled as the taxi driver had been. No, no such street existed, and no rooms were registered to rent under the grandmother’s name. The tourism folks were very nice, though, and booked us a rental room in a big private house surrounded by palm trees between the walled town and the port.

  It turned out that Rose’s grandmother was real; after we’d gotten settled, the tourist office helped us track her down. Not a little apprehensively, we knocked on her door. Fortunately, she spoke German in addition to Croatian, so Martin was able to communicate with her, and she invited us in for tea. She had never owned any cottages, she told us, and hadn’t heard from Rose for years, and she certainly couldn’t imagine why her granddaughter would mislead us. Neither could we. Did she dislike Americans and enjoy playing tricks on them? Was she simply a pathological liar? We never found out. When we got back to L.A., I was tempted to call her or just drop into the bank, but decided against it, and simply chalked it up to experience. (I am still sort of curious, though. . . .)

  Our nonexistent cottage aside, Dubrovnik didn’t disappoint me. It looked like a smaller Venice without the canals (no wonder: under its old name of Ragusa, the city was controlled by the Venetians for 150 years in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), but with an overlay of something Eastern, non-Mediterranean, doubly foreign. And, I had to keep reminding myself, something communist—though about the only signs we saw of the totalitarian dictatorship I’d been conditioned all my life to expect in “commie countries” were official portraits of Marshal Tito in every shop and restaurant.

  We settled into a rhythm. We did some touristy things: We poked our heads into dark, chilly churches full of gilt-framed icons with Slavic features; visited the medieval pharmacy (still operating) with its shelves of old ceramic apothecary jars in the Franciscan monastery, and an exhibition of not very good local cityscapes in a city gallery; eavesdropped on an open-air concert of Vivaldi (we couldn’t afford even the cheap tickets); climbed up on the city ramparts and walked the walls; joined hundreds of evening strollers walking back and forth along Dubrovnik’s main street. I bought a phrase book and learned a few words of what was then called Serbo-Croatian, beyond the dish names I’d learned at the Adriatic. Mostly, though, we just lay in the sun on the seaside rocks outside the Pile Gate or took a motor launch to the pebbly beaches on the tiny island of Lokrum, just beyond the city’s harbor, and swam in the sea, and took afternoon naps, and read three-day-old English newspapers in cafés with wobbly tables and rickety metal chairs.

  After a few weeks in Dubrovnik, we got back on a ferry and went a bit farther south to the old sea captains’ town of Orebić, not much more than a handful of quiet houses and a shop or two, and then across a narrow strait to another walled city, Korčula, on the island of the same name, which was like a smaller, less touristy Dubrovnik. We continued to rent rooms in private houses, and spent our days on rocky beaches framed in tamarisk and pine trees or wandering along old stone streets and through scraggly vineyards. One of the vineyards, near a bare-bones swimming cove we frequented, grew an ancient grape variety called grk, and the rich, yellowish, aromatic white wine it produced, under the same name, became my favorite.

  I got very tan that summer and about as thin as I have ever been as an adult. What I remember most from my five or six weeks in Croatia, in fact, is being hungry. We didn’t
have a lot of money, for one thing, but it was something else, too: The restaurants we patronized, modest places above the beaches or in the warrens of narrow stone streets in the towns themselves, were universally understaffed and very busy. Once we got seated and ordered our meals—occasionally veal gulaš (goulash) but more typically ražnjići or ćevapčići or a kind of onion-specked hamburger patty called pljeskavica, made with pork, lamb, and beef—it would typically take an hour or more to get our food. We’d have to just sit there, sipping bubbly, salty mineral-rich water or nursing sour Croatian beer, our stomachs gurgling as other tables got served in order, painfully slowly, one by one. Sometimes instead of going to a restaurant, we’d buy food at a shop—grapes, tiny plums, or peaches; bread and butter, liquid yogurt, tangy cheese, maybe a chocolate bar to share—and eat in the shade by the beach. This wasn’t exactly backpacking and sleeping under bridges, but it was no packaged tour, either, and in retrospect I felt glad that I hadn’t been spoiled, in my first experience of Europe, by too much ease or comfort.

  For practical reasons—time and money, most of all, but also a reluctance to leave our seaside life too soon—I’d taken Zagreb out of my fantasy visit to Yugoslavia, but I was determined to get to Sarajevo. Martin wanted to go back to England for a week to spend more time with her family and see some friends in London, and I decided to stay on and head inland to the Bosnian capital myself by bus. The day before she left, I got very sick—dizzy, with aching joints, a bad headache, and a high fever. Martin couldn’t change her ticket home, so we took the ferry back to Dubrovnik together, I wishing for an early death as the boat sloshed through the water, jiggling my insides. She left me in Dubrovnik with a copy of the Newsweek international edition in whose margins she’d written a number of potentially useful phrases—“Call a doctor,” “Where’s the hospital?,” “I have a fever,” and so on—in German, and I bought a bus ticket and went off to follow my dream.

  The bus was a rattletrap affair, a big old pale blue, mud-splattered coach with hard plastic-covered seats and tired shock absorbers. It was packed, but as we jostled up the coast and then turned right, up into the foothills of the Dinaric Mountains, the driver seemed to stop every twenty miles or so to pick up a few more passengers, who’d perch on the edges of already occupied seats or stand, holding on to the luggage racks and swaying with the bus. I was still feverish, and the jouncing of the bus made my sore joints and muscles throb—but looking out the windows as we idled at our first stop, Mostar, and then crawled through the town, I was enthralled. I’d never seen a minaret before, and Mostar’s shot up from a bank of greenery like a rocket aimed at paradise. We passed the elegant Ottoman-built Stari Most, or Old Bridge, from which Mostar takes its name—a perfect humpbacked arch of luminous limestone spanning the Neretva River—which seemed to me one of the most graceful things I’d ever seen. (It was destroyed by Croatian Defence Council artillery in 1993, during the Bosnian War; a replica now stands in its place.) Most of all, I was amazed by the people I saw on the sidewalks or sitting on café terraces—men in black vests with nubby woolen caps, women in long embroidered skirts with scarves on their heads, children wearing necklaces of what looked like gold coins. Dubrovnik was more or less a Mediterranean tourist town, not dramatically different from one in Italy, but now I felt as if I were in the Middle East. I remember thinking that I was a very long way from a table at the Adriatic.

  When I got to Sarajevo, I was so weak that I could hardly move. I found a clean, surprisingly attractive, vaguely Alpine-looking hotel near the bus station, bought two bottles of mineral water, and went to bed. I spent the next twenty-four hours in something approaching a delirium, sweating, sleeping, moaning to myself. A maid poked her head in the door at one point, took one look at me, and disappeared. It never occurred to me that there might be something seriously wrong with me, even something life-threatening. I suppose I was young enough to still feel more or less indestructible. By the evening of my second day in Sarajevo, in any case, I’d begun to feel a little better. I went down to the hotel dining room and managed to eat a meat-filled burek and a salad of tomatoes and raw onions. The next morning, still weak but no longer burning, I went out to see the city.

  I went down to the Miljacka River, which flows through Sarajevo. Near the Ottoman bridge called the Latinska Ćuprija, I eased my feet into what were said to be the footprints, sunken into the concrete, of Gavrilo Princip, who had stood in that very spot when he shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914, setting off World War I. I crept into the sixteenth-century Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, with its turreted minaret, fatter than the one in Mostar, and gray-green domes—non-Muslim visitors were allowed in the afternoons—and gazed in wonderment at the expanse of warm-hued Turkish carpets covering the floor, the soaring whitewashed arches and tracery-etched wood doors, the icicle ornamentation descending from the edges of the dome.

  What I remember most vividly, though, is wandering through the Sarajevo market. This was in a big square just beyond the Husrev-beg Mosque, which loomed over one end of it. The stands were closely packed together, shaded by identical umbrellas in yellow, red, green, and blue. The aisles were crowded with housewives in drab dresses, farm women in white tunics and bright scarves, men in black vests and black caps, boys in T-shirts. A big woman in a peasant skirt and dark blue hood sat behind a low table filled with broad earthenware dishes heaped with spices—paprika, cumin, cinnamon, peppercorns. An old man with a furrowed face and an embroidered fez sold ceramic-lined copper cezves, long-handled pots for making Turkish coffee. There were piles of green tomatoes, jumbles of large, twisted squashes, acres of long red and squat green peppers, braids of onions, braids of garlic, bowls of apricots and plums both blue and green, cartons of light brown eggs, mounds of fresh white cheese sitting in yellow plastic tubs, a glass case full of chickens with their heads and feet still on. . . . I had never seen food sold like that. Even the famous fish and vegetable markets near the Rialto Bridge in Venice, though they were filled with things I’d never seen, had seemed somehow accessible, understandable. This was another world. I could have been in Istanbul, I thought. I had certainly never been anywhere else remotely as exotic. This was why I’d come to Yugoslavia, even if I hadn’t known that when I left Los Angeles.

  BACK HOME, MARTIN AND I parted ways, and I transferred from L.A. City College to Cal State, L.A., where I continued studying philosophy. I kept dining at the Adriatic, though now, I felt, with more authority. A few years later, I got a magazine job a few blocks from the restaurant, and for a time used to walk over to have lunch, either alone or with coworkers, at least twice a week, dispatching a bottle of red wine myself, and sometimes a slivovitz or two, before returning to my desk. I took girlfriends to the place, hoping to impress them with my pronunciation of the dish names on the menu and, I suppose, with my worldliness at having been to Yugoslavia. One night I had a twilight dinner there with somebody I was seeing, then dropped her off at home and met a late date, with whom I went right back to the place to have another meal. Gordana just looked at me with a faint smile when I reappeared, and almost imperceptibly shook her head.

  As the seventies unfolded, I went a little less often to the Adriatic, as I discovered other interesting restaurants and started spending more time at local music clubs in the evenings. In 1974, I came back from a two-week vacation to discover that the place had closed. The Sipovacs, it turned out, had decided that they didn’t want their teenage sons to go to Beverly Hills High—“There were lots of drugs on campus,” Gordana told me years later—and had moved to a town near Palm Springs, where they opened another version of the restaurant. It lasted until 1982, but I never got there. Bob and Gordana got divorced. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began falling apart in 1992, and after years of bloodshed splintered into seven independent states.

  Chapter Six

  AUX AMIS DU BEAUJOLAIS,

  Paris (1921–2009)

  I’M IN AN OLD-STYLE BISTRO DU QUARTIER—A NEIGHBORHOOD joi
nt—in Paris, on the corner of the rue de Berri and the rue d’Artois, two blocks from the Champs-Élysées. In the front room, there’s a long zinc bar, scratched and pitted. Behind it is a man of medium height, in his fifties, with shiny dark gray hair, an angular face glowing with bright red blotches, and a seen-it-all expression that is part grin, part grimace. With deliberate speed and a steady rhythm, he fills glass after glass with Sancerre or Beaujolais and serves up plates of shredded celeriac and carrots, pâté or Camembert sandwiches on hunks of baguette, and bowls of quivering crème caramel to waves of locals who stop in for a quick stand-up lunch. At small tables crowded against the windows, other customers take more time, eating, between cigarettes, their faux-fillet with frites, rabbit in mustard sauce, or blanquette de veau.

  The back room, with its murky off-white walls and red leatherette banquettes, is crowded with more tables, lined up neatly, almost touching one another, draped with pink patterned cotton tablecloths covered with sheets of shiny, dimpled paper. Daylight floods the room, through gauzy half curtains, softening the metallic glow of the fluorescent tubes along the ceiling. The air rings with rapid-fire French, accented English, and the clink of tinny flatware on cheap china.

  I’m sitting here with Claude. We’ve had glasses of Sancerre, icy and tart, at the bar, and now, elbow to elbow with our neighbors—a couple of tweed-suited businessmen on one side; two junior editors from Newsweek, whose Paris office is just down the street, on the other—we have finished lunch: pâté de campagne and a quarter of a roasted chicken for me, marinated herring and boeuf bourgignon for him, all irrigated with a bottle of pretty decent Beaujolais-Villages. We decide, as usual, to have another couple of glasses of red wine and some cheese. Claude leans back with an imperious scowl and booms “Jean-nine!” quite oblivious to the waitress’s whereabouts. “Un Can-tal! Un Roque-fort! Jean-nine!”