Acquired Tastes

by Peter Mayle

  And what an opulent, toy-filled, money-gobbling place it is, with everybody, it seems, hell-bent on conspicuous consumption. Messengers with £75 Reeboks, businessmen with hand-stitched crocodile attaché cases, middle-aged matrons staggering under the weight of their earrings, block-long limos on the ground, personal helicopters in the air, money being used up like oxygen—no matter how many times I go to Manhattan, I am always in shock for the first twenty-four hours at the speed with which a wad of bills turns into a pocketful of change. The solution, of course, is to avoid using money altogether, to switch to plastic and close your eyes when signing. Once I’ve made that simple adjustment, I can start to enjoy myself in suitably carefree style.

  There is such a giddy diversity of money-blowing opportunities in Manhattan that it would take superhuman stamina and organisation to take advantage of them all in the space of a few days. I try, heaven knows I try, but I never manage to accomplish as much as I want to. There are, however, certain rituals that I observe on each visit. These are obligatory and take precedence over the bouts of wretched excess that lack of time usually prevents me from enjoying. Never mind. There’s always the next visit. Meanwhile, I ease into extravagance with a trip to the barber.

  Maybe I shouldn’t call him a barber, because he is a haircutter whom other haircutters acknowledge to be one of the best in the world. His name is Roger Thompson, and his salon is downstairs at Barneys. He is often booked up for weeks in advance, and he has been known to turn away clients if their ideas about the right cut conflict with his. Put your head in his hands, and let him do what he wants. It will be the best haircut you’ve ever had, and it will cost you about £70.

  My next stop, en route to lunch, is the Park Avenue shoe shop Susan Bennis Warren Edwards. Whether this is one person with a long name or two people working together without the benefit of punctuation I don’t know, but somebody in the establishment has a fantastic eye for a well-formed shoe—simple, classic, immediately comfortable, breathtakingly expensive. Prices start somewhere north of £150 and accelerate rapidly if you should set foot in one of the more exotic leathers. A handsome felt bag is always included, as if you had bought emeralds.

  Two minutes away is one of my favourite restaurants outside France. I was first taken to the Four Seasons at an impressionable age, twenty-five years ago, and I had never seen anything like it. I still haven’t. The decor is stunning, with an attention to detail that is quite extraordinary. And then—another free show—there is the discreetly upholstered human furniture.

  If fate were ever unkind enough to let a bomb drop on the Four Seasons at 1:30 in the afternoon, the publishing business would be left like a headless chicken. There they are, the top editors, the top agents, the seven-figure-advance authors, whispering in zeros about paperback rights and film options while they pick with disinterest at their spa lunches. Even worse, they’re drinking water. Water, for God’s sake, when the wine list is throbbing with promise and the sommelier is waiting to take you by the hand and lead you through the Burgundies. How can they resist? I certainly can’t. Besides, I hate to see a lonely wine waiter.

  A hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds lighter, I feel sufficiently refreshed to deal with the rest of the afternoon’s business, which I try to divide between the equally appealing worlds of commerce and culture.

  Compared to New Yorkers, I am not a true shopper. I don’t have the stamina to work my way up and down Madison Avenue, rooting around among the cashmere socks and vicuña jackets and shot-silk suspenders, my arms growing longer with the weight of countless shopping bags, my overheated credit cards melting at the edges. I watch them, the true shoppers, their eyes gleaming with the lust to acquire, and I have to admire their tireless enthusiasm. I can only shop in short bursts, and I need professional help, someone who knows exactly what I want even if I’m not at all sure myself.

  That’s why, on practically every trip, I can’t resist going to the West 40s, the nerve centre of electronic gadgetry and laser-fast salesmanship.

  There are dozens of these stores, bursting with miniaturized marvels of high technology that are unheard of back home in provincial France—turbo-driven pencil sharpeners, underwater cameras, vest-pocket answering machines, digital pulse meters, eavesdropping equipment, featherweight video cameras, radios that are small enough to swallow. Do I need any of these extraordinary things?

  I have to wait no more than five seconds for the answer, because that’s all it takes for one of the salesmen to sprint the length of the shop and block the exit, talking deals and discounts and a year’s supply of free batteries before I’ve said a word. These boys are dynamite. One of them, on his own, is somehow capable of surrounding you entirely. Leave it to him. He will tell you what you absolutely must have. A floating phone? A voice-activated alarm clock? A pen that writes in space? You got it. And how about a personal stress monitor with a biorhythm readout? Here. Take my card. Come back soon. Have a nice day.

  When I eventually escape, it is to the relative calm of bookstores or the museum of Modern Art. But even this is demanding, thirsty work, and by six o’clock I am drawn, as if by some primitive migratory instinct, to somewhere cool and dimly lighted where I can consider how to spend the next few hours. It is during these reflective moments that the possibilities for wretched excess come to mind.

  One is to have dinner at the Palm restaurant on Second Avenue and to go fifteen rounds with one of those monsters in the pink-shell overcoats. The waiters there must be used to the customers’ looks of disbelief when the carcass is served. “What’s the matter?” they say. “Haven’t you ever seen a lobster before?”

  Or there is a ride down Fifth Avenue. I have heard about a limo that has a Jacuzzi in the back, and the thought of careening through town stark naked and raising my champagne glass to startled pedestrians is enormously appealing.

  I haven’t done it yet, but I will. I’ll report back.

  24

  Cher Ami

  The great Antoine died some years ago, in circumstances that I will come to later. But Chez L’Ami Louis, the restaurant that he owned and cooked in for more than fifty years, is still as he must have liked it: crowded and noisy, resolutely shabby, with a decorative sprinkling of pretty women ignoring their diets as they eat meals of nostalgic size.

  This is rumoured to be the most expensive bistro in Paris. I prefer to think of it as a bargain for anyone who is not ashamed of being hungry. People who toy with their food, or who profess a liking for large expanses of empty plate with tasteful dribbles of raspberry coulis in the centre—these poor scraggy souls will be horrified at the abundance. If you are one of them, read no further. You will only suffer vicarious indigestion.

  Chez L’Ami Louis is number 32 in the narrow, nondescript rue du Vert-Bois, where the sounds of heavy breathing were once louder than the traffic. This used to be a neighbourhood for assignations, a quartier in which every other building was a hot sheets hotel. Ladies and gentlemen could rent rooms by the hour in the maisons de passe before tottering round the corner, still slightly flushed, to recover at Antoine’s table.

  Even in today’s less carefree and naughty times, it is possible to imagine that the well-barbered man and his deeply décolletée companion whispering in the corner are taking an evening off from marriage, untwining their fingers and glancing up each time the door opens to see if it’s anyone they know. Is it guilt, or are they just looking for famous faces? Politicians and statesmen, Roman Polanski, Faye Dunaway, members of the Peugeot family, Caroline of Monaco’s ex-husband, the beau monde, the demi-monde—they have all been here, and no doubt they will all be back.

  But why? It is difficult enough to sustain the success of a restaurant for five years before fashion kicks the chef in the teeth and moves on to newer, smarter tables. How is it that a small and ramshackle establishment in an undistinguished street has been able to flourish since the 1930s? Even more remarkable, it is Parisians rather than tourists who have kept the restaurant busy; and P
arisians, according to popular legend, are fickle and spoiled for choice. So why have they come, and why do they keep on coming?

  Some of the best things in life are delightful accidents rather than deliberate inventions, and I have a feeling that Chez L’Ami Louis falls—or rather sits, knife and fork at the ready—into that category. There is a formula, if you can describe wonderful ingredients simply cooked and served in absurdly generous portions as a formula, but there is more to the place than that. It has a personality, a lusty air of appetite and unbuttoned enjoyment, and I suspect that this is the legacy of Antoine, whose ghost runs the restaurant.

  You see Antoine’s photograph at the far end of the room as you come in—a great, grey-whiskered badger of a man, who in his prime weighed well over 200 pounds. He looks out from his photograph at a view that has hardly changed in half a century. The black and white tiled floor has been worn down in patches to bare concrete. A venerable wood-burning stove squats at one side, its rickety tin flue slung precariously across the ceiling. The walls are the colour of roasted leather, black-brown and cracked. Straight-backed wooden chairs, narrow tables with salmon pink cloths, voluminous napkins, plain and serviceable cutlery. No artful lighting, no background music, no bar, no frills. A place to eat.

  The manager for the past fourteen years (whose name, appropriately, is Louis), as solid as a steak in his white jacket and black trousers, shows you to your table. The waiters take customers’ coats—cashmere, sable, mink, it makes no difference—roll them up and toss them with the practised two-handed flick of basketball players onto the head-high rack that runs the length of one wall. Gentlemen who wish to remove their jackets are permitted to do so, and are encouraged to tuck their napkins well up under the chin. The menu arrives.

  It is a single sheet of white card, hand-lettered and brief: five entreés, ten main courses, five desserts. The choice varies with the seasons, and there are many clients who time their visits to coincide with the arrival of fresh asparagus, the baby lamb, or the wild cépes. By early December, when I was there, winter had come to the menu; it was thick with the kind of food that clings to the ribs on a cold night.

  The first course of any good meal is anticipation, those marvellous, indecisive minutes with a glass of wine in the hand and the imagination dithering over the possibilities. A confit of duck? Some scallops, throbbing with garlic? Roast pheasant? Quail cooked with grapes? From where I was sitting, I could see into the kitchen, a blur of white-clad figures and copper skillets. I could hear the sizzle of meat and smell potatoes turning crisp. A waiter came past balancing a flaming dish at shoulder height. Veal kidneys flambé. He was followed by Louis, nursing a dusty bottle. Our waiter came and hovered.

  When in doubt, my Uncle William always used to say, have the foie gras. In fact, it is one of the classics of the house, supplied by the same family for two generations and said to have reduced many a gourmet to whimpers of delight. Yes, some foie gras to start with, and then a little roast chicken.

  I thought the waiter’s knife had slipped when he came back. There were four of us, and we had each ordered a different entree. But there was enough foie gras for us all—dense pink slabs, finely veined with pale yellow goose fat and served with warm slices of baguette striped from the heat of the grill. The other plates were covered with equally immodest portions of scallops, of country ham, of escargots. A second warm mountain of bread in case we should run short.

  It is either a shameful admission of greed or a tribute to the responsible attitude that I bring to research, but I tasted everything, and I can say that I’ve never eaten a better dinner. Unfortunately, the main course was still to come. I was beginning to see how Antoine used to maintain his fighting weight.

  He had started his career, so I was told, as a chef particulier, a private cook in a wealthy household, and one can imagine the terrible void he left in the family stomach when he went public, and came to the rue du Vert-Bois. Only two things in life could distract him from cooking; he loved horseracing and adored women. His favourite female clients were regularly smothered with garlic-scented embraces, and felt the touch of Antoine’s oven-warm fingers on their cheeks. And the ladies adored him. One evening when a world-famous beauty was experiencing some technical difficulties with her garter belt in the ladies’ room, it was not a woman who was asked to come to the rescue, but Antoine. He returned to the kitchen shaking his head in wonder, his hands forming voluptuous, quivering shapes in the air, muttering through his beard, “What magnificent thighs.”

  As it happened, my next course was an equally voluptuous chicken. When I ordered it, I had overlooked a crucial word on the menu, which was entier. The whole bird, shiny skinned, honey brown, moist with juices and resplendent of thigh, was carved with a dexterity that I always admire and can never achieve. (The victims of my carving, for some reason, have bones in unnatural places.) Half of this statuesque creature was put on my plate. The waiter promised to keep the other half warm for later, and delivered the pommes frites—a six-inch high pyramid of plump matchsticks that snapped softly between the teeth.

  Miraculously, I finished part one of the chicken while my friends dealt with their more reasonably sized young partridges. To the polite surprise of the waiter, I was unable to come off the ropes for a second round with the chicken, but he didn’t give up before threatening me with dessert. Wild strawberries? A nougatine glacée? A football-sized pineapple drenched in Kirsch?

  We finally settled for coffee, and an after-dinner stroll to the kitchen, which I hope will be officially recognised one day as a national monument. It is manned by Bibi, Didi, and Nini, who somehow turn out spectacular food in a small area almost completely devoid of modern equipment. Twenty or thirty battered copper pans hang over a blackened cast-iron range that was installed in 1920. The hotplates have worn through twice in seventy years, and have been replaced, and the heat is provided by wood—old, well-seasoned oak. And that’s it. No microwaves, no gleaming computerised ovens, no expanses of stainless steel. The kitchen editor at House & Garden would have a fit.

  But it works, so why change it? Anyway, change is out of the question. When Antoine was reaching the end of his career, he agreed to sell the restaurant on two conditions: the first was that it should be preserved in its original state; worn floors, rickety stove, cracked walls, and all. As for the food, that too should continue to be as it always had been—the best ingredients, plenty of them, simply cooked. The second condition was that his wife should be taken care of when he died.

  The legend of Antoine’s death begins with his profound dislike of medical fuss and doctors. When he became ill, his friends pleaded with him to go to the best doctor in Paris. He refused. In that case, said his friends, we will arrange for the doctor to come to the restaurant to see you.

  If you send a doctor anywhere near me, said Antoine, I shall kill him. But his illness persisted, and so did his friends, and one morning they brought a doctor—a brave doctor—to the restaurant. It was empty except for Antoine. He was seated at a table, a half-empty glass of calvados and a revolver in front of him, dead from a heart attack.

  Is it true, or did he die peacefully in a clinic in Versailles? I know which ending I prefer, and I think Antoine would have preferred it too. It’s better to die at home.

  About the Author

  PETER MAYLE was educated at Brighton College, England, and later at Harrison College, Barbados. He left school at sixteen and returned to England, where he failed to distinguish himself as a waiter and a laundry van driver before joining Shell as a trainee. He left Shell to join David Ogilvy’s advertising agency in New York, and subsequently spent nearly fifteen years in the advertising business on both sides of the Atlantic before leaving honest employment to become a writer.

  His first book, Where Did I Come From?, explaining the facts of life to children, was published in 1973 and is still in print today, more than three million copies later.

  In 1987, he moved to Provence with the intention of writing
a novel, but the distractions of his life interfered. These become the material for A Year in Provence, which was published in 1989. It has now been translated into 38 languages, and has sold between five and six million copies. It also spent three years on both the London Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. The sequel, Toujours Provence, followed in 1991. Since then, there have been a number of novels, including A Good Year, which in 2007 was made into a film starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ridley Scott.

  He has often been asked about his hobbies. The record will show the he has at various times professed an interest in amateur genetic engineering, musical espionage, diamond cutting, brain surgery for beginners, nude fencing and several other unusual leisure activities. These, alas, are all lies – attempts to add a little interest to an area of personal life that is normally devoted to less dramatic pursuits such as gardening and golf.

  In fact, his principal hobby is lunch. Probably to make up for several years of being forced to eat revolting school food when young. Indeed, he hopes that when death comes, it will be during the precise moment between the last mouthfuls of a fine lunch and the arrival of the bill.

  Living, as he does, in France, there are plenty of delightful opportunities to indulge this interest. The lunch addict can try his luck at everything from the three-star temple of gastronomy to the truck-drivers’ bistro; each excellent in its own way. And there is something sinful, unworthy, and most enjoyable about these pleasures, particularly when knowing that many are obliged to make do with a sandwich at the desk.

  On a more serious note, it was with great pride that Mayle received the distinction of being made a Chevalier in Légion d’Honneur in 2002.