Acquired Tastes

by Peter Mayle

  This is presumably what the floating business population of the world likes to find on its travels. I don’t. When I stay at a hotel, I like to feel that I’m a guest and not a transient unit in a convention centre. I like to enjoy those small and luxurious attentions that are impossible at home, and that only a diligent staff of two hundred can provide. To hell with streamlined and faceless modernity: give me the pleasure of being looked after by polite, well-trained, smiling people. In other words, give me a room at the Connaught.

  It’s easier said than done. The Connaught, the pride of London innkeeping, was built in 1897, when hotels resembled large houses instead of small office blocks. Consequently, the number of rooms is limited and most of them are occupied throughout the year by foreign royalty, the quieter members of American society, British landed gentry, and the occasional distinguished actor. Even when rooms are available, a reservation is not necessarily automatic. It helps to know someone who has stayed at the hotel, almost like a reference, just to be sure that you are the kind of person who will be comfortable with the other guests, and they with you.

  The main entrance, on Carlos Place, is small and polished, framed by flowers and presided over by a gentleman who is large and polished, from the silk of his top hat to the mirror finish of his shoes. He allowed my wife to carry her handbag; everything else in the taxi, from magazines to suitcases, was spirited away so that we could make an uncluttered arrival.

  The lobby is tiny by contemporary standards, no bigger than your great-grandfather’s study, and probably furnished in much the same way, with brass and glass and mahogany panelling, and carpets and chairs in those quiet colours that age gracefully until they achieve a kind of faded bloom. There is nothing to jar the eye, nothing too bright. Everything has a well-bred gleam—the brass, the glass, the mahogany and the teeth of the welcoming committee behind the front desk.

  We were asked who we were, and from that moment on all the hotel staff seemed to know us. How the information was passed along so quickly and so unobtrusively is a mystery, but from the chambermaid to the barman, everyone addressed us by name, a basic courtesy that I thought had vanished from hotels along with nocturnal shoe-cleaning and linen sheets.

  A young man in a black tailcoat showed us up to our room and promised to do the best he could with the London weather. Luggage and afternoon tea arrived, and we were left to unpack, although I had the impression that if the journey up in the elevator had overtired us, someone would have been happy to unpack on our behalf.

  We might have been in the bedroom of an English country house in the days when owners of country houses could afford to run them properly. There were fresh flowers on the table, and writing paper with the texture of new bank notes. Apart from the television set in the corner, the only concession to gadgetry was a tiny panel beside the bed with three buttons: one to summon the chambermaid, one for the waitress, one for the valet. Between these three, all things were possible. Should we find ourselves suffering from night starvation, a broken shoelace or a crumpled jacket, feel the sudden need for an extra pillow or an aspirin, want a pair of socks pressed or a hat steamed and brushed, a touch of the button would bring a member of our trio to the door within two minutes. It was how room service used to be, I imagine, before the invention of the telephone.

  Almost as welcome as the nearby presence of helpful people was the absence of self-congratulatory literature—those overwritten puffs that most hotels cannot resist scattering throughout their rooms to promote their bars and restaurants and telex machines and conference facilities. Indeed, there was a sentence in the single sheet of guest information that was wonderfully discouraging to anyone with an attaché case complex and a rabid work ethic. The sentence read: “Business meetings in public rooms will not be welcomed.” Work, like sex, should be conducted away from the view of other guests. The writer was a man after my own heart, and he was particularly firm on the matter of dress: “No jeans.” I warmed to him even more.

  I suppose the truth of it is that I am a sartorial snob. Jeans, running shoes, ski jackets, tennis shirts, yachting sweaters, great-white-hunter outfits and Australian bush hats are all admirable garments in the right place and at the right time, but they look sloppy, incongruous and rather silly in the middle of an elegant hotel. Some people may think it’s chic to look like an escapee from a logging camp, but not me. I like to be at least as well-dressed as the bellboy, and so I was quite happy to put on a tie for the first time in months before going down to the bar.

  Serious bars are in short supply these days. Interior decorators and gardeners and musicians have been allowed to run riot and interfere with the central purpose of a bar’s existence—that is, to provide solid, well-made drinks in congenial surroundings. It should be a simple matter; it rarely is. Either the lighting is so subdued that you can’t find your drink without a flashlight; or the piano player has fingers of lead and a killer’s compulsion to drown conversation; or the jungle of ferns and potted palms hides you from the waiter’s view; or the drinks are given absurd names that are an embarrassment to honest alcohol. One way or another, it has become increasingly difficult to find a bar that isn’t trying to be a social event or a stage set.

  The original Harry’s Bar in Venice is one of the few remaining havens for the man who wants to have a proper drink without unnecessary distractions, and the Connaught is another. The Connaught bar is, in fact, two interconnected rooms, furnished with small mahogany tables, leather club chairs and couches. Nobody stands at the bar except the barman, and so instead of having to look at a row of backs, as so often happens, you can watch an artist in action with bottles and glasses and cocktail shakers, quick and deft, doing his noble work with the relaxed precision that comes from twenty years of practice.

  He is one of several people at the Connaught whom I would like to kidnap and bring home, but it would be a mistake to separate him from his other half, the bar waiter. This man is, without doubt, the best I have ever come across. He has a juggler’s dexterity with loaded trays and brimming glasses, which is impressive enough, but what sets him apart from lesser waiters is the second pair of eyes he has in the back of his head. I also suspect him of telepathy.

  He is constantly on patrol between the two rooms, ready to eliminate thirst wherever it may be, responsive to almost invisible signals. A raised finger or even the twitch of an eyebrow is enough to order a fresh round of drinks. There’s no need to repeat the original order; he knows what you’re drinking and seems to know how long it will take you to drink it, organising his patrol so that he comes within eyebrow range as the last mouthful is going down.

  The drinks are the way drinks ought to be—good measures in sensible glasses, no frills. They are served with bespoke potato chips made that day in the hotel kitchens. The conversations going on around you are quiet and contented. There is no music. There are no business meetings. Calm prevails, life is good and the only major problem of the evening is to decide what to eat for dinner.

  A man who looked as though he was on leave from the diplomatic corps arrived from the direction of the restaurant. He gave us menus and a leather-bound wine list the length of a short novel before gliding off to let us choose in peace from a selection of classic French and English dishes. He returned just as I was reading that dramatic chapter in the wine list in which the old clarets are breaking through the £300-a-bottle barrier. I went back to chapter one, and we ordered.

  There are two dining rooms in the Connaught, and there is a certain amount of discussion, not entirely free from elitism, about which of the two is the centre of the universe. The hotel itself, very sensibly, keeps well out of this discussion, but there are those who will tell you that the Grill Room, particularly at lunch time, is where you are likely to see captains of industry and the more respectable politicians. In the larger restaurant, your companions will be run-of-the-mill duchesses and millionaires who are not burdened with affairs of state or concerns about the industrial health of the nation. Natura
lly, we chose to join these more frivolous customers in the restaurant.

  Our departure from the bar was free of any suggestion that drinks might have to be signed for or paid for; at least, not there and then. Residents of the Connaught do not have to involve themselves with the detailed expenses of eating and drinking. When you have finished, you get up and leave. Nobody will come rushing after you waving the tab. You’ll see it eventually, when you settle up at the end of your stay. Until then, bills are for other people, not you.

  It takes very little time before you get used to this agreeable system, and we were told about a regular guest at the Connaught who decided one night to have dinner at Scott’s, just down the street. He finished his meal, bid the headwaiter goodnight, and left to stroll up Mount Street before going to bed. He was shadowed at a discreet distance by a man with a bill. This was presented to the hotel, the necessary arrangements were made and the guest was not troubled.

  There may be more fashionable places to eat in London than the Connaught, but it would be hard to imagine anywhere more comfortable. The tables are widely spaced, beautifully set and decorated with flowers, the large panelled room is softly lit—all the things you would expect to find in a formidably expensive restaurant. What we hadn’t expected were such large helpings of charm. From the maître d’hôtel to the boy who wheels the roast beef up to the table for inspection, everybody behaved as though we were the couple they had been waiting all their lives to serve. They were more than professional. They were friendly, and many grand hotels are too busy being grand to be friendly.

  And the food? It would be unkind to tell you how good the food was. There is a group of chefs—men like Anon Mossiman, Nico Ladenis and the Roux brothers—who are becoming as well-known in England as Bocuse and Troisgros are in France. The chef at the Connaught is not such a public figure, but he cooks like a saint, and our first two courses were faultless.

  There was then a pause for the ceremony of the second tablecloth. My wife and I like to think that we don’t qualify as the world’s messiest eaters, and there were no more than a few crumbs of bread on the table as we sat back. These were removed. A fresh cloth of virginal whiteness was then unrolled across the table, glasses and bottles and plates being lifted and replaced with infinite delicacy, so that the final part of the meal could be served on a spotless and unwrinkled surface. It was a detail, not necessary but very pleasant, and typical of the touches that distinguish the Connaught from ordinary hotels.

  We had cheese, dessert, and coffee. Somebody, somewhere, had our bill in case we should want it, but we exercised the guest’s privilege and left it unseen until the day of reckoning.

  Upstairs in our room, linen mats had been placed on either side of the bed. They were embroidered with two messages. The first one, legible as you got into bed, read “Good Night;” the second, legible for the opposite direction, read “Good Morning.” I left my shoes outside the door, and we slept the sleep of the rich.

  The next morning, my shoes looked as though they had been reconditioned overnight, and they shone considerably more brightly than the watery London sun. There’s another man I’d kidnap if I had the chance. Shoe cleaning is a dying art in London, as a glance at most Londoners’ feet will confirm, and doesn’t exist at all where I live in France. If I could lure the Connaught shoe cleaner away, I’d treat him like a prince.

  In the interests of research rather than hunger, we studied the breakfast menu. It was Victorian in its abundance, the kind of nourishment that Englishmen used to fortify themselves with before a hard morning chasing foxes or building an empire. There was porridge, there were kippers, there were kidneys, there were different breeds of sausage, there was coarse-cut bitter marmalade and a baker’s range of breads. We had coffee and croissants and felt virtuous.

  We dawdled as long as was decent over breakfast, postponing our return to the outside world. My wife wondered what it would be like to live here permanently, and decided that it would be no hardship. I wondered what lifetime residence would cost. A clue was waiting for me at the front desk, slipped inside a leather folder, the first and last bill I would see during our stay.

  It has to be said that life at the Connaught is not for anyone on a modest budget, or indeed on any kind of budget at all. As the wise old millionaire once said: if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. During our visit, we had confined ourselves to breakfast and one other meal each day. We had avoided magnums of champagne and the $500 bottles of claret, and we had not made beasts of ourselves with midnight snacks of caviar, Grand Marnier soufflés, the grouse that had just come into season, or nightcaps of the 1948 vintage port. We had behaved with restraint and moderation.

  Even so, the bottom line after three days was hovering around £1,500, excluding tips, and it may require a little mental adjustment to think of £350 a day as representing wonderful value for your money. As far as I’m concerned, however, that’s exactly what it is.

  Setting aside the excellence of the cooking and the physical comfort of the hotel, the Connaught’s great attraction, and the asset that separates it from other expensive hotels, is the atmosphere created by the people who work there. They were, without exception, well-mannered and charming and supremely good at their jobs. To find people like this, to train them and to keep them, costs far more than any number of superficially impressive luxuries. All the marble lobbies in the world can’t compete with friendly human beings who are anxious to please you. That’s what you pay for, and it’s worth every cent. It used to be called service. Now, because it has become so rare, it’s called old-fashioned service. God bless it.

  19

  The Malt

  It’s very strange. We live in an age when man’s interest in his body verges on obsession: every visible moving part is subject to daily scrutiny, internal functions are monitored at least once a year by people in white coats, youth is prolonged, wrinkles kept at bay, stomachs sucked in, vitamins gobbled up. Yet, in the midst of this feverish physical surveillance, one small but vital part of the human anatomy is suffering from consistent, deliberate neglect. The palate has become a second-class citizen, and the taste buds are an endangered species, threatened with extinction through boredom.

  What has happened, presumably in the interests of more consistent nourishment, is that individual tastes and local flavours have taken a terrible beating at the hands of the mass-producers. A Third Avenue hamburger tastes exactly like a Champs Elysées hamburger. Chicken, once a bird, has been turned into a commodity along with pork and beef and lamb. And as for vegetables—when was the last time you ate a tomato, a potato or a salad that you didn’t have to smother with sauce or dressing before there was any hint of flavour?

  Bread like plastic, apples like wet socks, cheese with the delicate complexity of a bar of cheap soap, onions with no bite, spinach that would make Popeye choke. It all looks genuine, because everything from the lamb chop to the string bean is bred for appearance, but its resemblance to real food stops the moment you start to chew. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.

  Alas, even booze hasn’t escaped the insidious tinkering that produces uniformity and blandness. Beers are lighter, spirits are paler and drier, wine is being contaminated with soda water, and sales of taste-free vodka are booming. Ice is used with such reckless abandon that drinks are numbed rather than chilled, and the serious drinker now risks frostbite of the tongue more than cirrhosis of the liver.

  But all is not lost. Up in Scotland, there are men engaged in heroes’ work. They are not concerned with providing refreshment for the millions, but a taste of heaven for the few. Slowly, carefully and in small quantities, they are distilling single-malt whiskies.

  Basic scotch whisky, the kind you would be served in a bar if you didn’t specify a brand, is a blend of as many as thirty different whiskies—malts and the less distinctive grain whiskies. They are blended together for two main reasons. The first is to achieve a smooth and widely acceptable taste that is less idiosyncrati
c than unblended whiskies. The second benefit of blending is that it guarantees consistency. A good blended scotch, such as a Bell’s, a White Horse, or a Dewar’s, will never give you any unpleasant surprises. This is ensured by a master blender, who keeps a sufficient supply of malts and grains to maintain the balance that gives the brand its particular taste.

  The next step up in the scotch hierarchy is also a blend, but one in which only malts are used. These blends—‘vatted malts’—reflect the characteristics found in perhaps half a dozen single malts. Often ten or twelve years old (the age on the label is the age of the youngest whisky in the blend), they can be legitimately described as ‘pure malts.’ More pungent and more expensive than regular blended scotch, they offer the student of whisky a chance to acquire a general taste for malt before moving onward and upward into connoisseur’s territory: the single, unblended dram.

  It is here that the taste buds can be given some thorough exercise, because there are more than a hundred distilleries in Scotland that produce single malts, not one of which tastes exactly like another. With a magnificent disregard for mass marketing, the single-malt men are content to make their own highly individual whiskies—smoky, peaty and as distinct from one another as are wines from different vineyards. Some single malts are matured in old sherry butts, some in old bourbon barrels, some in old port pipes; all of these add different elements to the flavour. There is no rigid universal formula, no standard recipe, no ‘best’ single malt. It’s a question of personal tastes: the distiller’s and yours.