It seemed that the end-of-the-season boating races were not just an opportunity to have a little competitive fun. For Patrick, doing well in these races was paramount. The gist of it was getting to the issue of our “rating.” To accommodate boats of different specifications within each class, each boat is rated based on a constellation of factors: length, beam, weight, and sail area. The rating then serves to even the field of competitors. When the competitors cross the finish line the elapsed time is “corrected” with the rating in order to place the winners. Because of this system, a smaller boat can beat a larger vessel even though the latter physically crosses the line first.
Patrick had engineered this lunch not to exchange pleasantries with an old buddy, but because he felt the current ratings would give an unfair advantage to his arch nemesis, the sailing yacht Carina. On his own, Patrick had calculated the type of rating most beneficial to Serenity. Now he was here to solicit the owner’s help in getting the race committee to make the change. He saw the gifts as his expression of thanks for whatever could be done in order to help get Serenity a fair shake.
Of course, there was another way to look at the gifting. As soon as the owner fully understood what he was being asked to do, the conversation shut down. Not wasting a word, he cut off Patrick’s pitch.
“No, it’s not possible. The ratings will stay as they are.” He was clearly offended by the entire exchange and quickly excused himself from the table, ostensibly to attend to other matters.
It was a silent taxi ride back to the boat. Patrick stared out the window the whole way, his disappointment palpable. I felt sorry for him and a bit embarrassed by the whole experience, but glad I didn’t have to make small talk, because my thoughts kept returning to the fantasy lifestyle on the beach. There is a difference between almost there and being there. Suddenly I really wanted to be there.
When we got back on board, il Dottore was in the chart house talking with Michele, Kevin was sitting up on the foredeck, Ian and Nigel were below taking a kip—a quick nap—while Scott monkeyed around in the engine room. The galley was clean, a nice sight after leaving lunch on the mess table. A short nap seemed like a great idea, but no sooner did I go to lie down than Rick appeared in the mess area with a bunch of shopping bags.
“She had me schlepping all over!” he exclaimed in a tone that revealed hurt pride. Being seen in a town as a rich woman’s caddie had been very painful.
I couldn’t help but laugh at his resort to Yiddish. “Where did you learn to say that?”
“Remember, I was married to an American!” he responded.
He then handed me a half-kilo tin of beluga caviar and a loaf of pain au levain—lightly sour bread—from the famous Senequier bakery.
“La Signora would like caviar for lunch,” he told me. “With lemon, some butter, and thick slices of the bread lightly toasted. I need to get champagne to them and set up the cockpit tout de suite. She told me while we were in town that all they drink in summer is champagne and Chablis.”
“That’s all they want? Easy enough.” A few glasses of rosé at lunch had put me in a very agreeable state, so I quickly thought about reworking what I had earlier prepped for lunch to use for dinner. “Where’d you go?”
“Everywhere! Hermès for soap, Frette for robes, Lalique for all kinds of table ornaments—table ornaments! We’re on a boat! I don’t know why she needs so many!” he said over his shoulder as he hurriedly went into the pantry to assemble the champagne service. “I still have to go back to Chanel and pick up seven more pairs of shoes. She couldn’t have just one. She had to have every color in the line!”
Sunday was a breeze since I was ahead on prep. The plan had been to stay in port for the night after il Dottore and la Signora left, but Patrick, no doubt wanting to put distance between himself and the failed attempt at Club 55, informed us we’d be leaving soon after their departure. This left Rick a bit unnerved since he had been looking forward to an evening to play in town with no onboard service responsibilities. I kept busy securing the galley for sea until a sharp call from the crew hatchway sent me up on deck. The rest of the crew was standing in a line by the cockpit. Michele pointed me to the spot next to Patrick—in the penultimate position.
“What’s going on?” I asked Patrick.
“It’s a traditional parting line,” he said and left it at that.
The only time I had ever seen this was when I did some work at Regaleali, a large winery estate in Sicily. I had been asked to stay for a few days longer after my recipe-translating assignment in order to help the monzu—the estate chef—with a banquet for eighty, the guest of honor being someone quite special. Until I was on the premises, they couldn’t tell me who that guest would be. It turned out to be none other than Prince Charles. I had a chance to meet him after the meal as he wanted to give the chef and me his compliments on a job well done. He was very polite and, for the few minutes that we spent with him, gave us his undivided attention. The next day I was invited by my host, herself a countess, to attend his parting ceremony. From the back of the room I watched him give gifts to the line of hosts and others he had met during his stay. At one point, he came up to me and gave thanks for acting as translator when his traveling chef spent some time in the kitchen with us. To me, that was the epitome of etiquette.
On Serenity, this same type of farewell ritual, sans gifts, would happen whenever the owners left the boat at the end of a visit. It seemed so quaint, so old-world, so Upstairs, Downstairs—so unlike the owners’ reputation for being ultramodern in the way they ran their businesses.
The couple emerged and began their farewells with Ian at the far end, shaking hands as they said a few words to each crew member. I caught snippets of conversations, mostly “thank you” and “good job” to my fellow crew members. It was amazing to hear the owners shift from English to French then Italian and back to English without hesitating to find the next thought, comment, or gesture.
When it was my turn, I was nervous. This was my first face-to-face with la Signora since the pâté episode. “Davide,” she began, her eyes locked onto mine, but with that European graciousness that she had shown at our first interview.
“Next weekend in Monte Carlo will be a very busy weekend for all of us, but especially for you. You remember, yes? When we first talked, I told you that in late May, at Monte Carlo, our yachting season officially begins with the weekend of the Grand Prix car races.” She didn’t wait for me to answer.
“We will be docked between the sailing yacht Pegasus, owned by our friends, to one side and our motor yacht, where the children will stay, on the other. We will arrive on Friday with three other couples, so we will be eight in total. The owners of Pegasus will have guests, and all of our four children will be there. You need to be ready for cocktails and a casual dinner for twenty that night. On Saturday,” she went on, “a simple lunch—maybe a ‘parade’ of antipasti,” as she put it—“for up to twenty-four, just in case a few more than expected drop by.”
Then she dropped the bomb—the bomb that would put me in a near panic.
“On Saturday night, on the eve of the race, you should expect, let’s say, about a hundred people for a party that will stretch across the three yachts. Just have large quantities of food available”—“abbondanza,” she said.
“The menu can be very simple. Canapés with foie gras. A seafood salad for an antipasto, two pastas—one with a vegetable sauce and the other with shrimp—a fish course—salmon with a light butter sauce—then a meat course—say, bocconcini of veal with a red wine sauce—some sort of vegetable or mixed green salad, and for dessert, it is fine if you order a nice assortment of petits fours from a patisserie. Everything should be prepared and brought up to the deck on platters, then served on small plates for eating in piedi”—while standing. “Therefore, all of the items need to be fork-friendly—short cut pastas like fusilli or rigatoni, the fish cut into small portions, bite-sized pieces of veal. Petits fours make perfect sense for dessert.
She finished with a question: “Hai capito?”—Do you understand?
“Sì, signora,” I answered. It was an easy enough question to answer. I had understood every word. I wondered why she was questioning it. So I said nothing. Actually, I didn’t know what to say.
“Allora,” she said with a slightly squinted look of authority in her eyes, “fai bene”—do well—finished with a “See you next weekend,” always in Italian, then moved to Patrick and thanked him in English. The owners walked down the passerelle and got into a taxi waiting for them on the quay. Kevin and Rick followed with their bags.
After what had been for me a restless night of sleep, about an hour into our day on Monday morning, Patrick announced that we had to be at the mouth of Monte Carlo’s harbor no later than six-thirty the following Thursday morning. Otherwise, we would not get our reserved spot in front of the public pool at the center of the quay. If you want to be able to step off your boat and onto the quay during the Grand Prix—for which there are only a limited number of these coveted spots—arriving when the harbormaster dictates is an absolute must. Missing it means you’ll be, at best, in the back of the harbor having to ferry owners and guests through the dense crowd of boats. With la Signora’s plans for the weekend, Patrick was so concerned about missing the gate that he decided to arrive an hour earlier than our slotted time. That meant we would be leaving Antibes at one or two in the morning, a few days from now. I had a lot to do before then.
As soon as la Signora had left, I had gone down to the galley to write down everything I remembered from the parting-line conversation. Then I set my notes aside, figuring I would deal with planning everything the next morning. But instead, all that night, I tossed and turned, asking myself how I was going to pull off a party for a hundred around all of the other entertaining. The schedule and numbers staggered me. At one point, I thought about suggesting we hire a catering company to help, but then I realized I would probably have received an answer like, “What did we hire you for?”
Even Rick, ever so nonchalant, seemed uncharacteristically nervous when I sat down with him to discuss what we needed to do first.
“She’s crazy. And this is just the beginning!” he said as he went up on deck to have a cigarette. Both of us knew Monaco would be tough. We just didn’t know how tough.
If life is said to give second chances, then Monte Carlo was mine. La Signora’s instructions for the Grand Prix weekend had been clear, so clear that I got the sense that there was no margin to deviate. Those feelings were exacerbated when she said “foie gras” instead of “pâté” as she recited the menu. Was she being specific because that was her way, or because she was afraid that if I continued to use my judgment her entire weekend would be ruined? Would a step in the wrong direction in Monte Carlo land me on the beach watching Serenity sail away?
For the crew, Monaco would be a long weekend off, just keeping the deck clean and polished, each one taking a turn for watch at night, the rest heading off to one of the English bars near the port. For Rick, it was going to be busy but manageable. For me, it would be the hardest I have ever worked in my life.
How many people one will cook for is the most important criterion for all matters relative to delivery. For Monte Carlo, I was nervous because of the vague guest counts. Exactly how many people was I really cooking for? A hundred and fifty? Two hundred? I decided that I should cover myself and plan on cooking meals for two hundred guests over the course of the weekend.
There were some key words from la Signora, such as a “‘parade’ of antipasti,” that kept me wondering exactly what she had in mind for quantity, regardless of how many guests and how much they might eat. How many items constitute a parade in her mind? What about “abbondanza”? How does she define abundance? At least I got a break with the petits fours, a course I only had to procure, not prepare. And she had mentioned a display of thirty cheeses. What if it turned out I could fit no more than twenty-six on the table? And I knew the visual aspect had to be right. One chef I worked with liked to say that we taste first with our eyes. It takes a deft hand to attractively present food as well as to prepare it. I never even thought to ask her what kind of garnishing she liked, if any.
After writing the menus for each of the meals, I created the almighty ingredient list and tallied how much of everything I’d need. It was categorized by how I shopped, and it also corresponded to my list of vendors and suppliers: meats and poultry, fish and seafood, fruits and vegetables, dairy and cheeses, bakery and desserts, groceries, and, finally, anything miscellaneous, which was mostly nonfood items like food storage and cleaning supplies. Because of the volume, I also had to preorder certain items and arrange for deliveries to the boat. This would save me time since the purveyors would take care of “picking” the order rather than me spending time in the shops.
At these numbers, the amounts of food that had to be prepared were off the charts given my work space. I looked around the galley and the mess area. Storage was a huge issue, both for perishables and for nonperishables. There was no room. I could see how my efficiency would be slowed as I would spend much time climbing and rummaging through the raw materials, then looking for places and ways to store the prepped items.
Michele came by to check up on us, and I asked him if I would have an opportunity once in Monte Carlo to do any provisioning there. I thought maybe I could stagger my acquisitions through the weekend. He shook his head and explained to me that because of the hordes of spectators in the city, closed streets, and crowds milling about on the quay, getting around was going to be difficult. Plus, I didn’t know any vendors or have any sources in Monte Carlo. I would be best served by loading up as much as possible in Antibes and getting bread and breakfast pastries onshore during the weekend.
Since the city was basically cordoned off and the marina would be packed with yachts, the only efficient way out of town was by water, so Michele had hired a cigarette speedboat with a driver to be used as a water taxi. For an emergency this would be the method of choice and also, he explained, would be how the owners and guests would transit from the Nice airport when they arrived. Since I didn’t need the petits fours until Saturday night and the cheeses until race day, Michele suggested that I order them from shops in Nice and use the cigarette boat for a delivery rendezvous while in the port.
Rick timed his return to the galley perfectly.
“I know a great patisserie in Nice,” he said, “and a cheese shop nearby.” Perfect. One worry off my mind. Part of me suspected he really wanted a ride on the cigarette boat and for that reason jumped right in to help. But I didn’t care about motives, only that my dessert be taken care of and on board at the right time. “Make sure to include two kinds with chocolate, some small lemon meringues, and an assortment with fruit, and get about”—“abbondanza” kept ringing in my head—“360 pieces,” I told him. That would be three per person, maybe a little high on average, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Then I wrote a list of cheeses that had a nice range of styles, textures, and flavors, all the while considering how they would best be displayed on the table: some I would precut into small pieces, like Beaufort and raw milk Comté others I would leave in whole form, like round Camembert and square Pont l’Évêque.
“I just hope no one asks for espresso after dessert,” Rick volunteered. “If I make one for somebody, suddenly everyone else will decide they need one as well. And then I’m screwed.” I knew why. We had only a small, domestic machine on board.
I was determined to make everything from scratch. I was cooking for Italians, most of whom were probably used to eating in great restaurants. When I went over the menus with Rick, he offered to get some of the ingredients on the list, promising he knew exactly where to f
ind them, which in turn lessened some of what I had to acquire.
“Are you sure you have this under control?” I asked as a final confirmation that he now owned the assignment.
“No problem,” he assured me. Remembering that he had worked in upscale restaurants, I assumed he knew what I was after.
So I wrote the prep list, considering how much time many of the tasks would take and confirmed what was needed for each of the menus. The Saturday party was the biggest challenge, so I amortized some of the projects over the days ahead, like making the sauces. They’d actually taste better after a day or two in the refrigerator since the flavors would evolve. I saved the butchering tasks until after dinner on Friday—cutting the salmon into small portions and the meat into bite-sized pieces—since keeping fish and meat whole for as long as possible would be better for shelf life and storage.
I placed orders with my short list of vendors for items that had the greatest volume on my menus—the meats, fish and shellfish, fruits and vegetables. Rick and I went over a rental order for china, silver, glasses, and linens. We didn’t need much for the “smaller” meals, but for the big party, which was a stand-up occasion, I wanted to be covered for the first three courses. I figured by the fourth course we would have washed enough plates for that course and the momentum would continue throughout the rest of the meal. This meant three hundred small plates. We also ordered three hundred dinner forks instead of salad forks. “It’s more elegant,” Rick said. Some knives and spoons just in case. A hundred and fifty champagne glasses. A hundred and fifty wineglasses. Water and rocks glasses. Linen cocktail napkins. The rentals were scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. Rick assured me the food items I needed from him would be there, too.
Rick ordered flowers to be delivered to the boat early on Friday morning. Three arrangements for the salon and dining area plus two large ones for the deck. He went to the wine shop in town and bought two huge salmanazars of champagne—nine-liter bottles, a case worth in each. As he wrestled the bottles down the hatchway, he proclaimed, “We can’t be at the Grand Prix without these!” I had no idea how to find the space in our reefers to chill them. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” he promised. “I will ask one of the captains of a nearby motor yacht if we can store them in their refrigerators.” Some large motor yachts have restaurant-style walk-in refrigerators on board.
Mediterranean Summer Page 10
