Acquired Tastes

by Peter Mayle

  I’m sure it exists in other parts of the world, but I have never seen it carried out with more telling effect than in the cluster of pretentious restaurants within a few minutes’ drive of Bal Harbor, where the squeeze is more popular than shuffleboard. It works like this: as you enter the restaurant, a man, for some reason dressed in evening clothes, swoops toward you, teeth and shirt-front gleaming. You have never seen him before in your life, but he insists on shaking your hand. This is the first test of your savoir faire and acceptability. If your handshake rustles with money, you pass the test. (Five pounds just about gets you through, £10 gets you a B+ and £20 is an A.)

  If the shark in the tuxedo discovers that your hand contains nothing but fingers, he will look pointedly at his own empty hand. This is your second chance, the moment on which your dinner hinges. Grease the palm and all is well. Leave it ungreased and suffer the consequences.

  You will be shown to a cramped table in between the two swinging doors to the kitchen, tossed a menu and a wine list, and abandoned. You will be buffeted by the stream of waiters coming and going, but none of them will stop. You will try to catch the shark’s eye, but it will always be looking at that fascinating patch of blank wall six inches above your head.

  I have a friend, a hero in his own small way, who dealt with this treatment as it deserves to be dealt with. He got up from his seat and bodychecked one of the waiters to attract his attention. “You know the area,” he said. “Where can we get something to eat while we’re waiting?”

  Unless you enjoy confrontations of this kind, your meal will drag on, marked from time to time by reluctant visits from an offhand waiter, until you ask for the bill. That is the signal for the shark—the man who has pointedly ignored you all evening—to reappear, all teeth and charm, to ask you if you enjoyed your dinner.

  Most of us would mutter something and escape as quickly as possible, but not my heroic friend. He looked straight through the maître d’hôtel as though he weren’t there, got up and walked out of the restaurant. The maître d’hôtel, with the thick-skinned tenacity of an encyclopaedia salesman, followed him out into the parking lot.

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  My friend turned round, took a £10 note from his pocket and held it under the maître d’s nose.

  “This was for you,” he said.

  The maître d’ smiled. The squeeze had worked again.

  And then my friend took out his lighter and set fire to the £10 note, waving it back and forth before dropping the charred fragment to the ground.

  “Enjoy your evening,” he said.

  There is no record of the maître d’s reply.

  Satisfying gestures of this kind, of course, should be confined to those places and people whom you never want to see again. With your regular ports of call, you’d better resign yourself to the fact that your continued popularity and comfort will depend on whom you tip, when you tip and how much you tip. We’ll leave aside those once-in-a-lifetime encounters that are truly worthy of reward—the tax man who believes you, the mechanic who fixes your car on time, the courteous sales clerk at Bloomingdale’s—and concentrate on three major centres of the gratuities industry.

  Bars

  Don’t waste your time trying to calculate how much to leave; the bartender will do it for you by soaking an appropriate part of your change in a puddle of vermouth. When you finish drinking, simply pick up the dry money and go. In more elegant establishments, add ten percent to the bill. The management has already slipped in a substantial charge for ice cubes, so anything more would be excessive.

  Hotels

  I have found that tipping in advance improves the level of service and avoids the embarrassment of being ambushed in the lobby at the end of your stay. Scatter your largesse on arrival, when it can do you the most good. Don’t forget the doorman: a couple of dollars on a dry day will make sure he produces a cab in a downpour. Unfortunately, advance tipping doesn’t work for room service, and I have yet to work out how to reduce the waiting time for a club sandwich and a beer to less than forty-five minutes.

  Restaurants

  A sly and greedy practice has developed in some restaurants that will be stamped out only if enough of us stamp. In many cases, a 12½ or 15 percent service charge has already been quietly built into your tab, and if you’re not careful you could be adding a tip to the tip. Have no part of it. Ask the waiter if service has been included. If it hasn’t, tip him. And don’t automatically hand over 15 percent—on a three-figure tab, 10 percent is quite enough, in my opinion.

  Always tip the sommelier, who can steer you towards the hidden jewels on the wine list on your next visit. Never tip the salad waiter, a dreadful Californian invention that should not be allowed in any serious restaurant. And be kind to the cloakroom girl. You never know. She may send you out in someone else’s vicuña overcoat.

  22

  The Private Jet

  Once or twice a year, our friend Felix the tycoon comes to Provence for sunshine, French cooking, and a brief escape from the cares of his office. I’m not quite sure what he does—a little high finance, the odd merger, an occasional dip into real estate—but it always involves several guarded phone calls as soon as he arrives at the house, and his attaché case is always bulging with the latest information on cocoa futures or corporate high jinks. But whatever the deal of the moment may be, it is put aside twice a day for the pleasures of the table. Felix loves his food.

  It was spring when he last visited us, and over dinner he was discussing his favourite subject: the next meal. Where would we like to have lunch tomorrow? What he had in mind was fish, perhaps one of those garlic-charged bouillabaisses that can only be properly made by a French chef with fresh Mediterranean fish. And of course, he said, the only possible place to eat something like that is at a restaurant that overlooks the sea.

  There is no shortage of food with a view in our part of Provence—restaurants that overlook mountains, rivers, fountains, village squares, vineyards, valleys—almost any view is locally available except a view of the sea. The nearest temple of bouillabaisse is in Marseilles, sixty miles away and a nightmare when it comes to parking. Even for a good gastronomic cause, that’s a long haul. We asked Felix to think again.

  He looked up from the assortment of cheeses that he had been deliberating over and beamed. Distance, he said, was not a problem. Nor was parking. He had brought his plane. It was at Avignon airport, a mere twenty-five minutes away, ready to take us wherever we wanted to go. The world was our oyster. Or lobster. Or even bouillabaisse.

  By 9:30 the next morning we were at Avignon airport. Small and informal, it’s the way airports used to be when flying was fun. There was no standing in line to check in, no officious ground staff to herd us into a departure lounge, no waiting, no fuss. The pilot and his co-pilot met us, and together we strolled out to the plane.

  It was a business jet, cream on the outside and quiet pale grey in the cabin. There were seven seats covered in glove leather, personal stereos, coffee and drinks in the stamp-sized gallery in the back. It was rather like the Concorde, but without that exasperating running commentary they insist on giving you, and with more leg-room. Felix told us it could cruise for four or five hours between refuelling stops, which meant that anywhere in Europe was within reach. As it happened, he had some business to do in Nice before lunch, so that Mediterranean city was our first stop.

  We flew south until we reached the coast and then turned left, staying low enough to give us a continuous panoramic view of the Riviera. Felix consulted his restaurant notes as we passed over the towns and ports that shone in the morning sun. Let’s see now. There’s Le Chabichou in Saint-Tropez, Le Palme d’Or on the Croisette in Cannes, Belles Rives in Juan-les-Pins, La Bonne Auberge in Antibes—he made small humming noises of contentment at the thought of what the master chefs below us might be preparing. What a choice! What a choice!

  The jet glided into Nice, and we had a pilot’s-eye view of the la
nding. Before the engines were even cut off, a car was on its way across the tarmac to pick us up and take us to the terminal. A decision had been made about the restaurant. We were going to Cap d’Antibes, and, to avoid battling the traffic back to Nice afterwards, we would meet the plane at Mandelieu, the small airport just outside Cannes.

  A young man in impenetrable sunglasses and a designer suit met us at the terminal and massaged us into a stretch Mercedes Benz. Felix was off to buy a bank or a yacht, or maybe both. He waved aside the details. What was really important, he said, was that we should do a little shopping for him before lunch, some provisions for his kitchen at home. Armed with a list and the Mercedes, we headed for the old flower market.

  The Rue St.-François-de-Paule, which leads into the market, is notable for two well-established and delightful shops that could make a statue’s mouth water. The first is Pâtisserie et Confiserie Auer, for chocolates and pastries and jams; the second is the tiny olive oil kingdom of Alziari.

  The girl who served us in Auer was impressed by the jam requirements that Felix had scribbled down; un vrai connoisseur de confiture, she called him as she packed a huge assortment of jams made from clementines, bilberries, apricots, tiny bitter oranges, plums and melons. Did we have transport for this enormous carton? Indeed we did. As Felix had pointed out, you can buy in bulk when you have a plane to take the purchases home.

  We went across the street and into Alziari. The shop is small and made smaller by the ceiling-high stainless steel vats filled with first-pressing olive oil, described, with typical Gallic bravado, as ‘extra virgin.’ We were invited to taste a teaspoonful before omitting ourselves. Virginal and delicious. We placed the order for several dozen litres, and while they were being drawn off from the vats and sealed in five-litre cans we worked our way down the rest of the list: three kilos of fat black olives; a dozen bottles of raspberry vinegar; jars of mild, almost sweet, anchovies in oil; pots of the olive paste called tapenade; packets of saffron; tubs of lavender-scented honey. By the time we were finished, there were two more enormous cartons, and the trunk of the Mercedes was beginning to resemble a comprehensively stocked gourmet store.

  Felix joined us for a pastis in one of the bars alongside the flower market. He looked preoccupied, and I asked him if there had been a hiccup in his business dealings. Certainly not, he said. But on the way to the café, he had seen some exceptionally large and handsome langoustines and was now of two minds about what he should have for lunch. He communed with his appetite all the way to Cap d’Antibes.

  Bacon, which one of the stomach bibles claims is the Rolls-Royce of seafood restaurants, rises like a perfectly cooked soufflé above the narrow coast road. The sea view is wall-to-wall, and the dining room is lighted by diffused sunshine. Felix rubbed his hands in anticipation as we went in, and his nostrils twitched at the scent of grilling fish, herbs and garlic. “All great fish restaurants,” he said, “smell like this.”

  A middle-aged couple, she decorated with jewels and he with a major moustache, were bent in devotion over a steaming tureen. They both wore bibs, and as they watched the waiter transfer the contents of the tureen to deep dishes, they rubbed small rounds of toast with cloves of fresh garlic before spreading on a thick layer of rust-coloured sauce—the rouille that gives the fish stew a final pungent kick.

  The main course was decided. To get into the spirit of the occasion, we started with mouthfuls of sea bass wrapped in a gauze of pasta and moistened with a truffle sauce. The white wine came from Cassis, a few kilometres away. We had travelled farther than anything on the menu.

  Our tureen arrived, together with the trimmings and the bibs, and the waiter filleted the fish with just a spoon and a fork, deftly and quickly. He would have made a fortune as a surgeon. He murmured, “Bon appétit” and left us to it, and I wondered why it is that the best meals are often the messiest to eat. After twenty minutes with the garlic and the rouille and the rich, soupy juice, I felt that I needed a bath.

  Lunch stretched into two hours, then nearly three, as lunches tend to do in France, and, a creature of bad habit, I began to worry about getting to the airport on time. Felix ordered more coffee and leaned back in his chair. “What you have to remember,” he said, “is that the plane doesn’t go anywhere until we’re ready to go. We decide the schedule. Have a calvados and stop thinking like a tourist.” I did both. It was wonderful.

  We eventually got to the Mandelieu airport and loaded the gourmet store into the back of the plane. There was no word of reproach from the pilots. They’d been sunbathing. As we took off, I thought that I could very easily become used to this civilised and leisurely way of hopping around Europe, free of the time pressures and the cramped aggravation that have reduced airline travel to the same level of enjoyment as that of a subway ride at rush hour.

  Was it, I asked Felix, completely beyond the resources of the normal wallet?

  It all depends, he said. For instance, if one person were to take the plane from Avignon to Paris, the cost would be substantial—around 48,000 French francs, or £5,000, for fuel and landing fees. Mind you, he said, the plane lands in Paris only a few hundred yards from where the Concorde takes off, so if you were in a hurry to get to New York City, that would be the quickest way to go.

  But there’s another way of looking at it. Let’s say your company has offices all over Europe, and let’s say that four of you need to visit those offices in as short a time as possible. Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich, Milan, and London could all be comfortably fitted into a work week. Plans could be changed and meetings could run over and it wouldn’t matter. You would never miss your flight. It’s not only convenient, it’s also the most time-efficient method of shifting busy executives around. And it would cost, in total, only about double the first-class commercial airfare for one.

  I said that it sounded dangerously close to being a bargain.

  Exactly, said Felix. If you’re doing business all over Europe, it makes perfect, comfortable sense.

  I’m sure he’s right. But I shall always think of it as a hell of a way to go to lunch.

  23

  Manhattan

  Manhattan was once kind to me when I needed a break, and I’ve had a soft spot for the place ever since. I had been trying to get a job in London as a copywriter. It was a hundred years ago, very early in the Sixties, and London advertising agencies were run by elegant and mostly rather unintelligent men who had been to Eton and Oxford, and who liked to surround themselves with young gentlemen from equally elitist backgrounds. I had not been to Eton or Oxford or indeed any university. Nor was I elegant. With such severe social handicaps, I was unable to persuade anyone to give me an interview for what used to be called a position—not even a position in the mailroom. And so, in the grand tradition, I decided to join the huddled masses yearning to be rich and travelled on the Queen Mary by sub-economy class (below the waterline) to the old pier at the end of West 52nd Street.

  Manhattan was a revelation. Anything was possible, often by the end of the week. Hard work was rewarded generously and instantly. And to my great relief, nobody gave a damn about Eton or Oxford. I’m sure I was lucky, and I’m sure there were many who weren’t so lucky. But I have marvellous memories of Manhattan. For me, it was a special town.

  It still is, fortunately for different reason than as a haven from unemployment. When I go there now, it’s for a vacation, for the most complete change possible from my everyday life in the boondocks of Provence, for a dose of electricity, and for fun.

  You’ve probably never heard this from anyone else, but I almost enjoy going through Immigration. It’s so quaint. The man in the uniform searches in his computer, eyes glazed with boredom, for traces of my criminal record and draws a blank. But he doesn’t give up. Here comes his trick question.

  “What is the purpose of your visit?”

  I’m always tempted to bring a few moments of interest to his day, to try to deglaze his eyes and to give him the feeling that he is guarding Americ
a from the forces of evil. The purpose of my visit, Officer? Oh, just the usual—mainly racketeering and a little light pimping. Perhaps some narcotics trafficking if I get a spare moment, but you know how it is in Manhattan; there never seems to be time to fit everything in.

  I wonder if he’d even blink. He’d probably scrawl ‘business’ on the forms and wish me a nice stay.

  With the formalities out of the way, I can start to make serious inroads in my travel allowance by getting into town from the airport with the proper degree of self-indulgence. A cab is out of the question. So is the helicopter service: I tried it once and was deeply disappointed by the lack of civilised facilities. By the time I’d discovered that there was no bar, it was too late to get out.

  Since then, I’ve used a limo, and to make sure that everything is as it should be, I call ahead to tell them not to forget the champagne. With traffic the way it is nowadays, a man could die of thirst in a four-mile traffic jam through Queens.

  So here I am, feet up and bubbles in hand as the lights of Manhattan appear on the horizon. My credit cards tremble with anticipation, and I look forward to my first brush with the natives, who provide one of the best shows in town: Drama, low comedy, grotesque characters, pungent language—it’s all there, and it’s free.

  There is a man, usually squatting on the sidewalk at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, who glares at every pretty woman who passes by and mutters at each of them, “Change your underwear, babe.” They pretend they haven’t heard him, but you can tell that they have.

  There are the early evening mano a mano contests, in which two executives dispute over a taxi. The dialogue is wonderfully predictable:

  FIRST EXECUTIVE: “That’s my cab, you asshole!”

  SECOND EXECUTIVE: “Who are you calling an asshole, you asshole!”

  Confrontation and abuse are everywhere, and I suspect that a lot of it is put on for hicks like me, just to let us know that we’ve stumbled into the big city.