“I grew up in New York, and then lived in San Francisco for a couple of years.”
“I like California,” she cut in, then added, “Did you know Newport Beach is the sister city to Antibes?”
“No, but only because I haven’t spent a lot of time in Southern California.”
“And now you are in the south of France!” she said. “What do you do on the boat?”
“I’m the chef.”
“An American cooking for Italians. That’s interesting. Your owners must like your food.”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve only prepared one meal for them so far.”
“Then you have a challenge.”
“I do?” I asked with a little bit of dry wit but was curious as to what she had to say.
“Well, you know, part of your job is to make them look good.”
“I haven’t even thought about that.”
“C’est normal. You never know who they will have on board. But your boss was very pleasant when she came to the shop to choose your uniforms. And she knew exactly what she wanted.”
It was a brisk walk back to the boat. At least for a short while, any concern about la Signora, the season ahead, and my galley disappeared from my thoughts.
As I approached Serenity, a unique sound from an incoming jet caught my ear and pulled me out of my waking dream. The noise gave off a generated pitch higher than a standard commercial jet. I looked up and saw why. The beak-nosed Concorde was on its approach, flying across the bay to Nice. Then I noticed Rick on the foredeck locked into watching it pass over us. All of a sudden, Rick stood at attention and saluted, loudly saying, “Vive la France! Vive la France!”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I love this!” he proudly replied. “This is French progress!”
I found Rick’s heartfelt pride in a French-built mechanical object admirable. As much as the French focus on their historical legacies of culture and food, often looking backward to celebrate the present, the sight of a homegrown modern spectacle could really turn people out. I realized Americans were so used to innovation that we often took it for granted. Rick smiled as the plane dipped over the Bay of Angels toward the airport in Nice, making a rare landing on the Côte d’Azur.
After a day off, I woke up with a throbbing headache from a potent combination of sun, alcohol, and a fitful night of sleep. Rick’s influence had once again overpowered me, and we ended the evening on unsteady legs. I had joined Rick, Patrick, and Ian on a late-night binge in Juan-les-Pins. Patrick walked into the crew quarters with an aura of seriousness but looked a little pale when he told us the owners would be flying down to the boat the upcoming Friday evening. This was a different Patrick from the party-boy American we drank with the night before. His tone could only be described as curt, especially to Rick, and he left no question in anyone’s mind that we were his subordinates.
On Saturday, he said, we would take Serenity out on her first overnight run with the owners for a trip past the Estérel coast to the region of the Var and Saint-Tropez. I’d be preparing a full rotation of dinner, breakfast, and lunch for two days. This gave me a couple of days to plan the menus and do the major provisioning. By Thursday, everything seemed to be in order. I went over my notes about what la Signora had told me the day of my interview, and the word “pâté,” underlined, jumped out at me. I felt a rush of panic. I didn’t have any on board yet.
I grabbed some cash and went to town. Rick came along since he needed teas and confiture from another shop that sold products from Fauchon in Paris. There was a shop near the market called La Ferme de Foie Gras—The Foie Gras Farm—that sold high-end charcuterie from Gascony: duck and goose liver in all forms of terrines, mousses, and pâtés. They had a wonderful selection of saucisson, game pâté, and all of the accoutrements for the Gascony table: mustards, cornichons, and pickled onions, along with a nice selection of wines and liquors from the southwest of France. Rick mentioned that a piece of confit or a pâté sandwich was right up his alley and asked if I could keep some on board for him. I said no problem and grabbed a bottle of Armagnac for me.
The stylish saleswoman matched the put-together decor and furnishings of the shop. She spoke very formally as she presented the line of food items that were house specialties. Then she gave us samples to taste—goûtez—of the selections of pâté from the glass and polished brass case: a smooth duck terrine, pheasant with pistachios, venison with black truffles, and a country pâté of pork au cognac. She pointed at the rabbit pâté with green peppercorns, but Rick immediately waved her off. There is a superstition about never having rabbit on board a sailing vessel. Even the mention of it could spell doom.
Like many superstitions, this one began rationally. In early sailing days, rabbits were kept on board as food. Once in a while, they would escape their cages and chew on the hemp lines below deck and in the bilge. This weakened lines, which in time caused them to break, collapsing the rigging and suddenly throwing the boat out of control. In rough seas it could even cause a vessel to sink. Over time rabbits came to symbolize bad luck and were banned from boats. Rick told me I was not even supposed to think about the subject while at sea.
I made a nice selection, five different kinds, about half a kilo of each. I added a few jars of condiments to complete the presentation I envisioned—just like the photos of food on silver platters in the seminal encyclopedia of cookery, the Larousse Gastronomique. I looked at Rick for his reaction. After all, pâté was French.
“I think maybe you are killing them with kindness,” he said with a smile.
“How so?”
“This is a very nice selection,” he said.
“La Signora was very specific about having pâté on board,” I said, then turned to the madame. “C’est tout, merci”—That is all, thank you.
The owners arrived late Friday, so I abandoned the full dinner menu and prepared a light supper for them: baked rockfish with Madame Quillier’s rouille on the side and some roasted new potatoes dressed with a little oil from Vence and coarse sea salt—everything really simple. I waited in the galley for a reaction, but once again none came. I poured myself a glass of Armagnac and sat there sipping, consoling myself that no news is good news. I closed up the galley and went to sleep.
Saturday was dawning warm, with only a gentle wind under a light blue sky as we got under way. Under motor power, Patrick steered us out of the harbor and out toward the open sea. As soon as we cleared the breakwater, he called for us to take our positions on deck and raise the sails. It was an awe-inspiring sight as the steady wind filled the sails when they were trimmed for our close-reach point of sail. When Patrick cut the motor, we were sailing westward toward the Var. While Kevin took the helm, il Dottore, Michele, and Patrick walked the deck together, il Dottore stopping here and there to examine something more closely or to point it out to Patrick. There were some add-on tasks, suggestions from Michele, and some talk about changes to the rigging and the blocks, but my work was waiting for me in the galley, so I left to go down below. With the motor cut out, I could hear the whispered splash of the sea against the hull as we knifed through the Mediterranean. The calming gray noise, along with the gentle rocking, lulled me into a Zen calm as I went about preparing the crew’s lunch.
We were able to stay on each tack for long distances, and the light wind didn’t heel the boat too much. By keeping just a couple of miles offshore, we had some beautiful sights to our starboard side: the harbor towns of La Napoule and quaint Théoule-sur-Mer, then from Miramar to Cap du Dramont, the sensational coastline of the Corniche de l’Estérel. It made a great backdrop with its dramatic brick-red-colored cliffs, deep green patches of low herbal brush called maquis, and small sandy beaches next to the cobalt blue sea. All of this I could see through the porthole in the galley.
Around eleven, Rick came down to the galley and said that la Signora requested a snack of pâté. I was relieved I had remembered her instructions. Rick filled an ice bucket and prepared
a champagne service while I worked.
I composed a nice arrangement of pâtés to one side of a large round silver platter. Opposite, I placed a cluster of cornichons in a lettuce leaf cup, then filled another cup with pickled pearl onions, a third with diced aspic, and then a small porcelain crock of Dijon mustard. I thought it looked smart. I sliced up a crispy baguette and placed it in a silver bread basket lined with a linen napkin that Rick had provided. He admired the platter, saying it was “gorgeous.”
A few minutes later, I heard footsteps coming down to the galley that were clearly not Rick’s. There she was, la Signora, platter in hand, little on it having been touched. If I had any doubts about her lack of enthusiasm for my selection, they ended when she dropped the platter on the counter.
“Daveed,” she said, using the French version of my name. This meant trouble. I had the sense that la Signora invariably switched into the French “Daveed,” from the Italian “Davide,” if she was displeased.
“What is this dog food you sent us?”
For a long few seconds, I didn’t say a word. Was there a right answer to her question? Then I started babbling about the high-end charcuterie I had found, how I had bought their best pâtés.
“Daveed,” she said. “Foie gras! Not dog food! When I say pâté, I mean foie gras.” With that, she turned and went back up on deck.
Rick came into the galley from the pantry. He had heard it all. He shrugged and with his arms extended, palms up, tried to offer some silent sympathy.
“I know,” I said. “You were right.”
“But I could have been the wrong one,” he answered, “and you the right one.”
“Yeah, right…”
“Don’t worry. You prepare nice dishes for them and she will soon forget.” As he looked over the food on the platter, almost to the point of salivating, he asked, “Can I make a sandwich with this dog food?”
“It’s all yours.”
Four
Truth in Numbers
Saint-Tropez
The eerie silence in the galley following la Signora’s pâté outburst was broken only by the lapping noise of water against Serenity’s hull as she cut and rocked through the wake of a passing motor yacht. Rick could sense my dismay and gave me some space to deal with it, going off to eat his sandwich in the pantry. I hoped that Saint-Tropez, now within striking distance, would act as a salve for my battered ego. I thought about my good intentions with the soigné variety of pâté and the care I took in its clever presentation and wondered how I had gone so wrong.
The sound of deck shoes coming down the crew ladder and into the galley pulled me out of my funk. It was Patrick. His quick gaze went first to me, then to the abandoned platter on my work counter, then back to me again. I began to wonder if maybe this was going to be the first time a chef was fired for serving the wrong pâté.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It wasn’t what la Signora wanted. When she says ‘pâté,’ she apparently means ‘foie gras.’ I didn’t know that.”
“Huh? She seemed pretty cordial at the table.”
“You should have seen her down here a few minutes ago.”
“She called it dog food!” Rick chimed in from the pantry. You could hear the smile on his face.
“I bet it won’t happen again, will it?” Patrick replied, only barely holding back his own chuckle. But that was all he was going to say on the subject. It wasn’t Patrick’s style to talk a problem to death, especially when there was no way to change what had happened. Anyway, he had come down to deal with his agenda, which involved Rick, who by then had stepped back into the galley.
“When we get to Saint-Tropez,” he said, now facing Rick, “la Signora wants to go shopping, and she wants you to go with her.”
“This must be initiation day,” Rick said, suggesting he was about to get his.
Patrick turned back to me. “And if you can get the crew lunch set up early, why don’t you come with me to Club 55?”
The prospect of having lunch at the famous beach club allowed me to finally let go of the pâté incident. “What’s the occasion?”
“The owner of Club 55 is one of the organizers for the Voiles de Saint-Tropez regatta, and I need to speak with him about changing our rating.”
I eagerly accepted the invitation, but it wasn’t the prospect of fine-tuning my knowledge of regatta handicap formulas that lured me to join him. It was the opportunity to forget about the boat for a couple of hours.
Patrick leaned over to look through the starboard porthole and seeing we were passing the Pointe des Sardinaux, the northern landmark to the gulf of Saint-Tropez, said he needed to get back to the wheel and hurried up the ladder.
About twenty minutes later, while I was assembling the crew’s lunch, I heard the sails starting to luff—flopping, dumping wind, and depowering—as the boat was turned toward the wind. We were preparing to go into the marina. I went up on deck to help with dropping the sails and docking.
Up top, while looking at Saint-Tropez from outside the breakwater, I was surprised by its appearance since I was expecting to see a town more in the style of Miami Beach—mid-twentieth-century hotels and apartment buildings with long windows and terraces overlooking the promenade that fronts the coastline. But the postcard view was completely different. In comparison, Saint-Tropez looked quaint, even old in its untouched collage of pastel-colored facades with dark red terra-cotta roofs and light blue shutters, all closed along the upper floors of each edifice.
When we got into the marina and started to back into our spot assigned by the harbor attendant, a crowd of onlookers had gathered on the quay. Boat docking, I would soon learn, is a great spectator sport. People gather around each arriving boat to catch a glimpse of what important person might be walking down the passerelle or hanging around on the aft deck. As soon as we made fast and coiled our stern lines, la Signora, with Rick in tow, stepped on dry land, the curious onlookers wondering if she was somebody important and if so, who? A few minutes later, Patrick and I went ashore and headed for Club 55. Patrick was armed with a canvas bag full of swag—a bottle of champagne, a large photograph of the boat, and a sweatshirt with the Serenity logo.
To get to the taxi stand, we walked along the quay Suffren, which rings the port of Saint-Tropez with a grand line of cafés, restaurants, and shops under multicolored canopies that jut out from the facades of the harbor buildings. Beyond the quay, a sloping urban plan suggested a harbor town bowing to the water. We made our way to the taxi stand, passing the smartly dressed store windows of the chic boutiques and pedestrian-only alleys paved with ancient hand-cut stone.
Saint-Tropez, I had learned, is named after its patron saint, Torpes. History has it that in A..D 68, a brutal mistral tossed a weather-torn ship onto the coastline, its crew consisting of nothing more than a dog, a cockerel, and a headless man. The body belonged to Torpes, a high official under the Roman emperor Nero. Torpes apparently decided to convert to Christianity, which did not go over well with his boss. Nero became so incensed that one of his most trusted advisers converted he ordered Torpes tortured and beheaded. His body was loaded onto a boat with the animals and sent out to sea. The idea was that the cockerel and dog would eat the body before the boat made landfall. But no such luck. The ways of the sea pushed the boat to the shores of what would become Saint-Tropez. In honor of this poor headless traveler, the village took the name Saint-Torpes, which eventually evolved into Saint-Tropez.
Born a fishing village, it became home to artists and writers who came to refill their well of creativity, and then, eventually, to a certain type of European socialite. It might have remained exclusive had not the director Roger Vadim made the seaside hideaway the destination for those who have the need to see movie stars and other celebrities in real-life moments.
“You’re going to love it,” my father had said during one of my infrequent calls home. “I can still picture the table-dancing scene like it was yesterday.” What was he talking abo
ut?
In the late 1950s, Vadim saw in this idyllic location the perfect place to introduce the world to his starlet young wife, Brigitte Bardot, in the film And God Created Woman. A sensuous location for a new star oozing a new kind of sensuality. But as the film played to sold-out audiences in movie houses throughout Europe and America, the avant-garde backdrop for the film became a star in its own right. Saint-Tropez would never again be anyone’s private retreat. My father had seen the movie when it was released, and I think he developed a particular fondness for Brigitte Bardot that lasted well into middle age. He sounded a little jealous that his son, not he, would be walking Saint-Tropez’s streets.
It took us about ten minutes to reach Club 55—Cinquantecinq—the best known of the clubs along the Pampelonne beach for the style set. We were led to a table on the terrace nestled among the low branches of tamarisk trees and patches of indigenous bamboo-like reeds called canisse. Large white canvas awnings tied off to thick white poles shielded us from the sun. As Patrick ordered a bottle of chilled rosé, I subtly lifted my neck up and to the right to try to catch a glimpse through the thicket of trees of the beauties who were tanning themselves on matelas that hovered like îles flottantes—floating islands—over the light beige sand. The owner was busy managing the dining area, so Patrick and I ate alone. My lunch of a salade pêcheur— a fisherman’s seafood salad—and then a daurade royale—a regal member of the bream family of fish—grilled and served with braised fennel was perfectly prepared.
Just as we were finishing, the owner came over to our table. From how Patrick spoke of him on the way to the club, I assumed that the two were old friends glad to have crossed paths again, using the occasion to celebrate Patrick’s new job as skipper of Serenity. Patrick handed him the bag of gifts, and they struck up an animated conversation, catching up on local yacht-world news and Serenity’s refit.
Mediterranean Summer Page 9
