• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 235 0

of us was good at driving, especially after lunch—I think that Gore didn’t drive at all—we hired a car and driver. We were told that he knew the local roads. One late afternoon, as we were heading south, the driver lost his way. I remember a road sign pointing to Mont-de-Marsan, but where this was in relation to our destination neither we nor the driver had any idea. It had begun to rain, and through the windshield I could see our forlorn driver at the roadside, holding a map, staring up at the Mont-de-Marsan sign, as helpless as ourselves. Gore meanwhile had opened his red Michelin and taken command. “We shall dine and spend the night at Magescq,” he announced in his Napoleonic mode. “The route from here is direct.” “What is Magescq?” I asked. “It is a two-star inn, in Les Landes. If we head into the sunset, we shall be there for dinner,” Gore intoned as I scribbled a few notes. We retrieved our driver and were on our way.

Except for its church, its mansard steeple an inverted pot painted black topped by a spire, like the Kaiser’s helmet, and the two-star Relais de la Poste with its pebbled courtyard, Magescq is little more than a widening of the old Napoleonic road from Bordeaux to the Spanish border. In a roadside field in the early-spring drizzle, the kitchen boys in their whites were kicking a soccer ball. Ours was the only car in the pebbled courtyard. The season had not yet begun. We were led upstairs to our rooms by the proprietor’s daughter, a pretty girl in her early teens, her smile conveying the correct solicitude and distance, as if she had been performing these duties for decades. In the morning, she would appear in her robe to serve orange juice, croissants, and filtre in a breakfast room off the lobby. In my narrow room, where the bed occupied nearly the entire space, a card was propped against the phone with the number of the local doctor.

The dining room that evening was empty except for our driver at a corner table near the kitchen and a skeletal man and woman in matching black turtlenecks, who must have arrived after we did. They were silently sharing a plateau of Belon oysters. At the entrance to the two-star dining room, soigné but simple beneath an ancient beamed ceiling, were a silver tray of thrush and grouse in their feathers, and above them, propped against the wall, a larger tray of feathered woodcock, their beaks crossed like swords at a military wedding. These and a display of pheasant were framed by boxes of white asparagus, and baskets of morels, mâche, and fraises des bois.

That evening remains forever vivid in memory: the dining room with its soft lighting and aura of well-being; the hint of butter, shallots, and herbs in the air; the captain serving foie gras with green grapes from a porcelain cocotte, then pouring a perfectly chilled Sauternes; later, the salmon, so fresh that its eyes seemed to blink when it was brought to the table, and the white asparagus with its subtle hollandaise, and the Corton, and then the lamb. After a pause, some local cheese, a soufflé, filtre, Armagnac, in dated pots. Gore went up to his room with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. I lingered over coffee and Armagnac in the empty dining room until the lights were dimmed.

I have tried to duplicate this meal, as fugitive as a dream, with no success, but when I return to Magescq, it is as if I had never left.

The Inn at Little Washington, about an hour and a half south of the District of Columbia, with its whimsical elegance, glorious service, and superb kitchen, is my other favorite country inn, which, like Magescq, exists in a timeless world of its own, despite the sleek Washington notables who punctuate its dining room. I had been hearing about the Inn for years and meant one day to go there, but the trip from New York by plane to Dulles Airport and then by car to Little Washington seemed impossibly difficult. Then I came upon a remark by Patricia Wells, the Paris food critic, that her three favorite restaurants in America that year were Chez Panisse, the wonderful Café Boulud in New York, and the Inn at Little