Are you a Gourmet Snob?
Please view article in the Guardian newspaper here.
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Please view article in the Guardian newspaper here.
I want to be quite clear about this, I didn't actually plan to go to the Columb D'Or, nor, certainly to write about it but circumstances, as they say, conspired.
I turned up in Cannes on Wednesday at around midnight to meet my wife at the advertising festival. For those of you who've never been, it's like the film festival except that nobody, and I mean nobody, is in any kind of twelve-step programme. Highly paid people with expense accounts and hotel suites, on the other side of Europe from the moderating influence of their families can be debauched in ways I no longer care to imagine. I had to attend several of these before I finally retired (hurt) from the industry and, frankly, was looking forward to this one like some shellshocked vet being choppered back to the zone.
It was Hell, much as anticipated. The Croisette was awash with body fluids, elderly executives pawed their comely PAs like Soho Humbert Humberts while a midget prostitute in leopardskin cavorted through the hotel lobby. Very last days of Empire.
By Saturday everything was winding down in preparation for the Porn Industry awards the following week (I think I was the only person left in town detached enough to see the irony of advertising being squeezed in between Film and Porn) and on Sunday morning I put Al on the plane and was left with a day to kill before flying home myself, at midnight.
Having never been to St Paul de Vence I thought it might be fun to whip up there for breakfast but I discovered that every available flat surface was being laid to take advantage of selling lunch to incoming coaches of Americans so I couldn't even find coffee and a seat.
I lurked about a bit then, around 12, headed back to pick up the car. As I passed the low gate of the Columb d'Or I thought I might try to duck in and check out the paintings. I was immediately apprehended by the Maitre D' who eyed me like I was about to nick the cutlery.
Knowing there was absolutely no chance, the place being double booked by admen two years in advance I said...
"Any chance of a table for lunch?"
To which he replied "Certainly, Monsieur" and seated me immediately at a table by the gate.
This was ludicrous. Sure, I was very hungry, but I was sitting in the most overbooked piece of dining real estate on the Mediterranean, by accident, and entirely alone.
First course was a salad of summer truffles which arrived looking and smelling pretty good. The tables had started to fill but, as everyone was still involved in the 15 minute preliminary ritual of air kissing, texting to missing members of the party and arguing with the maitre d' to get their table shifted to a notionally better spot, I was the only one eating.
It's been a few years since I was among these overpaid vampires and I suppose the most noticeable change is that their previously, merely gorgeous trophy partners were now clearly benefiting from the meteoric advances in cosmetic surgery.
This year, it's no longer sufficient to be draped in someone with the body of an aerobicised Greek statue, surgery is, it seems based on favoured patterns. First up was a rotund Italian producer with a faux Elizabeth Hurley followed by two Germans sporting sockless loafers and ersatz Jemimah Khans. It quickly became unnerving.
I think the final straw was a bewildered looking elderly Australian exec who appeared to be accompanied by a counterfeit Tori Spelling - I somehow think he'd got the wrong end of the stick.
(There was also a fake Burt Kwouk. I know it sounds weird... maybe he was real... Maybe there are people who want their partners rebuilt to resemble elderly Chinese comic bit-part actors. Frankly, I find the idea too disturbing to investigate).
The table by the gate would have been a disadvantage to most of the more status conscious guests but to me it was an ideal place to watch the drama of producers at work. Ad producers are the footsoldiers of the conference. Young, bright, frighteningly ambitious and, by the last day emboldened by encroaching renal failure to try anything.
Five separate producers tried the old 'I've got a reservation' trick on the jaded maitre d', only to be sent away with a scornful sneer. Finally, one, a feisty, redhead with a New York accent tried a new tack.
"We have a reservation"
"Non, Madame. You do not"
"It might be under another name...Weiss?"
"Non"
"Wassermann?"
"Non"
"Chung?"
There was a sudden flash of lightning.
Three security men jumped up from a big table in the centre yelling "No Pictures" and as the waiters looked up, the heavens opened.
The staff moved like greased polecats. The maitre d', a blur of efficiency uttered a few terse commands and within seconds every table was stripped. The remaining guests, fearing for their hair, had fled to the bar and once again I sat, in solitary majesty, alone with my truffles.
This was getting weirder by the minute.
A fantastically aristocratic looking couple meandered through the gate and sat next to me under the thundering canvas of my umbrella. He looked like a retired Colonel in the Guards and she clearly been a stunner back in the day.
"English?" he asked
I suppose it must have been fairly obvious.
"You're not with these ghastly advertising people are you?" she asked in brittle RP.
I replied in the negative with some degree of truth
"Ghastly people, he said, worse than footballers. We've been coming for the same fortnight since 68 and it's become unbearable".
"Next year, she said, we're coming a week later to avoid them".
I pictured their evening constitutional along the Croissette being interrupted by the ceremony for 'Best Double Penetration' or 'Best Supporting Actor (Group Anal)' and held my counsel.
They left to their 'favourite table under the mimosa' and, admiring their pluck, I turned back to my now empty plate.
There was a large, fat, maggot, string up at me with his little black eye.
I summoned the maitre d'
Now I've spent enough shifts as prep bitch to know that livestock gets through - particularly in fresh mesclun. I really didn't want to make a fuss and get some poor KP kicked to death in the washup so I quietly made my point by gesturing at the beast with a fork.
"Qu'est que ce?" shrugged the maitre'd
The creature lay utterly dormant looking exactly like a piece of discarded lettuce stalk. I poked again. It uncoiled itself like an overacting anaconda and the maitre d' took an involuntary pace back in revulsion.
"Wait... wait" I placated him in broken French.
I wanted to say "No, it's OK, I understand. I'm a cook. I don't want to make a fuss" but my French, crap at the best of times wasn't up to it. Try as I might, I couldn't remember the French for 'talentless and underpaid, sometime line-cook in my student days' and instead blurted out...
"Je suis un .....Chef!!!'
He looked at me in unbridled terror, glanced down at the open notebook on the table and fled...
Under the mimosa, the only other diners in the horizontal drizzle were the only witnesses to my abject confusion.
There are moments in a chap's life that will stay with him forever. Seeing my daughter born, driving a big rig over Blackfriar's bridge at dawn, seeing my first picture in a magazine, eating focaccia for the first time, breakfast in Les Halles in the rain and the sun breaking through on the terrace at the Colomb d'Or, eating truffles alone but for a pair of British aristos who's sexual horizons are about to be catastrophically expanded.
Of course. I shouldn't have been eating truffles in June. Allow me to digress for a moment.
When the recent CITES ban came into effect, I (along with every other hack in London) was commissioned to do a feature on caviar. Some other time and thread, I'll gather you round the fireside for the strange and savage tale of Sergio, the gay, Chinese caviar smuggler, but until then, content yourselves with this.
I was fascinated who still bought the stuff. Most foodies I know could take it or leave it, most people who actually could afford it were certainly too smart to spend money on something so overpriced and anyone left over with any conscience had stopped buying it on principle.
"Only the airlines buy it now, said Sergio. People who are thick enough to think it's classy but are spending other people's money. If they don't get their complimentary caviar in first class they're likely to storm the cockpit".
There's a whole economy based around selling supposed signifiers of luxury to those on expense accounts who know no better and, as you can imagine, Cannes during the ad festival is probably the high season.
Actually, they didn't taste too bad considering they'd come out of a jar, though, frankly, they could have shaved a champagne cork into a jar of sweatsocks and it wouldn't have mattered. That's not the point for these guys. A great big pile of truffles works like a brandy snifter bigger than your head, a cigar the size of a baby's arm and any old piece of horsemeat called 'Chateaubriand'. Next year I fully expect to see porkchops poached in Cristal, with a diamond crust and a light dusting of cocaine.
Note to self: Salade des truffes d'ete = jar of alba truffles, handful of leaves, empty wallet and a maggot
Now the diners were coming back. I ordered the aioli avec morue and watched the hairdos returning like a fleet of expensive yachts. A porn star, so well known he even cropped up on my radar was seated under the mimosa and was swiftly joined by two transvestites and a silicone-based life form of indeterminate gender. My new acquaintances went a strange colour.
I've never had aioli before. The veg were kind of cool, though a bit over carved for my taste and the stuff itself was pretty near sublime. I felt I wouldn't mind using it as a body moisturiser. The morue, though, was a pretty average bit of boiled cod. I'd got the idea from somewhere that it was supposed to have been dried then re-animated but these guys had cut out the intervening phase.
For most of the rest of the meal the maitre d' hid behind plants like a sniper. Occasionally I'd catch him out of the corner of my eye, slipping, wraithlike from behind the potted fig to snap up a check or failing to hide his face behind a bit of business with a napkin. Finally, when the tension became unbearable. He sidled over and comped me the whole meal.
I felt kind of guilty. I'd had a great experience, a better than average meal and enough material for a small book so I left a nice fat tip for the waitress and slipped out to the car.
In an ideal world, here's what would happen next.
I hop into my open topped Mustang and pull up outside the walls of the restaurant. I whistle quietly and, with barely a sound, Werner, my highly trained Swiss circus maggot drops into the passenger seat, winks conspiratorially and we screech off into the sunset.
What actually happened, is this - I ran into a bunch of animators I knew from London, spent the afternoon drinking, and missed my flight home but, hey, a guy can dream.