Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [101]
The third would be in New York and, among countless choices, the front room of the Union Square Café on West 16th Street. You are drawn to restaurants above all for their ambience and also for the memories of previous visits. There are other famous restaurants in Manhattan and perhaps, though this is not certain, more glamorous ones, but there are no restaurants that are finer. Food, service, knowledgeable people, publishers, perhaps even someone you know.
J.S.
THREE PLACES FOR LUNCH
After half an hour’s ride on a small ferry over choppy November seas from Dinard on the Normandy coast of France, coming to Saint-Malo. Set into the old rampart enclosing the town is À la Duchesse Anne; the apricot and yellow mosaic walls of the dining room are a refuge from the bluster outside. You feel well cared for: the impeccable service and food, deserving of its Michelin star, and the sense of having reached shore.
Twenty-five kilometers west of Florence, near Carmignano, is Da Delfina. The dining room is brown and rustic; the real pleasure is on a broad terrace where lunch is served in the summer and early fall. It overlooks a forested valley, and in the distance stands what is perhaps—or if it is not, it should be—a hunting villa of the Medicis. The impulse is to linger until the October sun is descending toward the treetops.
A few minutes walk from the hotel—the Hilltop—in the university section of Tokyo, down what is almost an alley to a place you would never find if they hadn’t told you. I don’t remember its name—a soba restaurant, an animated, harmonious room filled mainly with men in business suits. Not another western face to be seen. The buckwheat noodles, freshly made in full view in the kitchen, are served with various sauces in lacquer boxes that are soon piled in front of you. Inexpensive and delicious, and the reason you travel—to enter another world.
K.S.
BALSAMIC VINEGAR
Balsamic vinegar, deep brown in color and aromatic, is a product of Modena, a city also renowned for zampone, a sausage that earned the heartfelt praise of Garibaldi.
The genuine vinegar, as made in country houses in the region, can take thirty or forty years or even generations to produce, being moved with exceeding slowness through a series of wooden casks—oak, chestnut, and juniper—absorbing their flavors as well as those of the preceding vinegar. There is evaporation during the hot summers and maturing in the cold, damp winters. The liquid is so prized that in centuries past, small quantities have figured in wills and bequests.
The unique flavor, sweet and tart, is powerful, and only a few drops added to a regular vinegar-and-oil salad dressing, a pasta sauce, or the sauce of cooked meat or chicken will enhance it. Genuine balsamic vinegar is hard to find. The commercial variety is only okay. “Balsamic” means “health-giving.” In earlier times the vinegar was used medicinally, and it still can serve as a digestif.
ESCOFFIER
Auguste Escoffier is considered by many to be the greatest chef in the history of cooking. Born on this day in 1846, he may hold the record for the longest active career in the field. He went to work at age thirteen in his uncle’s restaurant in Nice. Six years later, he was a chef in his own right in Paris, and by the time he was in his early forties, he was in charge of the kitchen at the world-famous Savoy Hotel in London.
He followed the lead of Prosper Montagne, another great chef at the time, who believed that the quality of restaurant food was suffering at the expense of elaborate presentation. Escoffier became the standard-bearer in favor of simplifying menus, reducing elaborate decoration of food, speeding up service so food would arrive hot at the table, and organizing cooking teams to prepare dishes with more expertise and efficiency.
He created many recipes himself, and according to the fashion of the times, a number were named for celebrated figures