U - ) 1 /:\ ‘\ David Fingleton
By
opera
Eating out at the
IN THE SMALL, attractive spa town of Baden-Baden the Germans have just built a formidable 2,500-seat new opera house for DM120 million (£40 million). The state paid for the building, and now it is up to the town and private enterprise to support tt.There is no resident company, and ticket Prices for those that visit are on the Salzburg Festival scale. Thus when our own Royal Opera visited the Festspielhaus this month, top seatprices were DM600 — over '€2°0 — and attendances on the meagre side: even Placido Domingo conducting La Traviata could not draw a full house. Obvi- ously some hard thinking will have to be done, but it will be a great pity if the Fest- spielhaus does not succeed. The theatre is well constructed and designed, if not espe- cially exciting architecturally, has excellent acoustics and can be used either as an opera house or a concert hall. An attractive aspect of the Festspielhaus is its setting. It has been built on the site of Baden-Baden's old railway station, with the station façade still providing a screen to the building. Thus one enters the old station's booking hall to be confronted by a row of guichets with the word Fahrkarten set into the wall above them. Here today, instead of tram tickets, one spends a great deal more on those for the opera: the Germans always did have a robust sense of humour. To "es right is the mahogany and engraved glass entrance to what used to be the first- class waiting-room. The Festspielhaus has turned this into a first-class restaurant, serving dinners only, before, during or after the performance. Bel-Canto is a handsome place in which to eat, its late-19th-century decor providing the kind of belle-époque atmosphere that is found in the Vaudeville brasserie in Paris, of which I wrote recently. But of course bel canto is a more serious art than vaudeville, and this is unquestion- ably un restaurant serieux, with two young chefs, Italian and Alsatian, at the helm pro- ducing cooking that is, though described only in German on the menu, Franco-Ital- ian in character. be is certainly of a quality that one would oe Infinitely grateful to find attached to any opera house in this country, and it is not even expensive. My bill for two, with Lau- rent Perrier at £5 a glass, two courses, cof- fee and a highly drinkable local pinot noir rose at £12.50, came to just DM193 (£66.50): tremendous value. I dined at Bel- Canto before the Royal Opera's first per- formance of Verdi's rarely encountered early opera, I Masnadieri, and, appropriate- ly, my guest was Susanne Schuck, the Fest- spielhaus's charming and highly efficient press manager. Our welcome was warm, and glasses of champagne were set before us in a trice as we studied the impressive, but not overlong menu of six starters, a soup, five pasta dishes and three choices each of meat and fish.
Susanne began with an attractive salad of mixed leaves with slivers of smoked sword- fish, which she enjoyed, and I chose a mem- orable pasta: home-made gnocchi in a delectable creamy sauce of white summer truffles and pecorino cheese. The plentiful truffles were wonderfully pervasive, and the gnocchi commendably light: blended with the taste of the pecorino it made a remark- able dish, and one which I would have expected to have cost much more than the £11 charged. Susanne moved on to an osso bucco of monkfish, in which she found the fish on the tough side, but the sauce and accompanying timbale of potato and spinach to her liking. I am bound to say that I rather deplore the practice of trans- ferring one culinary epithet to another dish: we all know that osso bucco is knuckle of veal, containing bone marrow, cooked in a saffron sauce, with rice. None of this appeared to relate to the monkfish. On the other hand, my breast of pigeon baked with walnuts and herbs in a honey and chestnut sauce with asparagus spears and pommes purées was impeccable in both concept and execution, and much enjoyed.
Sadly, I Masnadieri's seven o'clock start did not leave enough time to try any of the desserts, and we settled for espresso coffee, vital to keep us awake during the opera after such preliminary gourmandise.
This admirable meal made a salutary contrast to that eaten the weekend before by the opera buff Ron Hall and me during the interval of Janacek's splendid Kat'a Kabanova at Glyndeboume. The four for- mulas proposed by the caterers Letheby and Christopher this season are a la carte meals in Upper and Middle Wallop, costing around £50 a head for three courses and coffee, without wine; a two-course carvery meal in Nether Wallop for £30.50 (starters and wines extra); and, in Mildmay Hall, Leith's offer two courses and coffee for £27, three courses for £34.75, with rump of lamb at a £3.50 supplement. Picnics may also be ordered at £37.50 a head, with an extra charge for porterage.
Ron and I chose the carvery and it proved a grim experience. The steamy, ill- ventilated, low-ceilinged room has too many tables, too closely packed together for comfort. All food, hot and cold, comes from the same two buffets, so queues are uncomfortably long. The hot roast beef was a debacle. The sirloin looked tired and grey, and when I asked the young chef who was doling it out for some beef that was rare, he replied that he did not think that there was any, that things were 'a bit hit and miss' tonight and one must 'take it as it comes'. Eventually he agreed to look for some rarer beef on the other buffet, and came up with some which was rarer but tasteless, and the vegetables served with it were an institutional disgrace, especially the grotesquely flaccid roast potatoes. Ade- quate summer pudding followed, but the coffee was disgusting. The bill for £75, including a bottle of wan house red Bor- deaux, was an outrage.
It it heartening to hear that David Vick- erstaff of Green's Restaurant and Oyster Bar in St James's intends to start arranging picnics for Glyndebourne and other events next year. On a trial run this season Char- lotte Rawlinson and I greatly enjoyed the selection of quails' eggs, top-notch smoked salmon sandwiches, succulent fresh lobster, rare cold fillet of beef, excellent salads of asparagus, baby tomatoes, new potatoes and mixed leaves, served with a variety of relishes, cheese, superb fruit tartelettes, coffee and chocolates. All this was a plea- sure to eat and was immaculately served in a wicker hamper and cold boxes. The picnic greatly added to our enjoyment of Handel's Rodelinda on a particularly inclement evening.
Bel-Canto: Festspielhaus Restaurant, Lange Strasse, 76530 Baden-Baden, Germany; tel: 0049 72213013325.
Glyndebourne Festival Opera: Letheby and Christopher, Glyndeboume, Lewes, BN8 SUU; tel: 01273 812510.
Green's: 36 Duke Street, London SW1; tel: 0171 930 4566.
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