Silence is golden
Jeremy Clarke
As we went in, our hostess mentioned that the restaurant had three Michelin stars, but at 78 years of age the chef felt he would rather live without the daily pressure of living up to three stars and had requested Michelin to reduce it to two. We were shown to our table and I chose to sit with my back to the large picture window, through which could be seen half a dozen mountains and a couple of lakes, and faced instead a blank wall. I thought I’d let others enjoy the view as we ate. But virtue has its own rewards, and after a few moments this blank wall slowly ascended, like a cinema curtain before the main feature, to reveal, behind glass, an immaculate, brightly lit kitchen with a dozen chefs in snow-white uniforms busily and unselfconsciously preparing our evening meal. I was famished.
We ordered the set menu. The first course was what appeared to be three small coloured paper fans each. I shoved these into my gob and my saliva dissolved them before they reached my gullet. The next lot of dishes placed before us were concealed under silver lids. At a nodded signal from the head waiter, these lids were simultaneously removed with a theatrical flourish. ‘Ravioli and gold,’ announced the head waiter. He wasn’t joking. In front of me was an expanse of rice with a three-inch square sheet of gold leaf floating on the top. While everybody else was looking down at the contents of their plates in dismay or alarm and wondering whether the gold was edible or purely decorative, I wolfed mine down in great golden spoonfuls. It didn’t touch the sides. Then I scraped the plate clean with three quarters of a bread roll and sat there wondering what the busy chaps behind the glass were going to come up with next.
We were seven at the table, and the wine was coming as fast as we could drink it, yet conversation at our table was intermittent. Partly to blame for this, I think, was the castiron silence of one of our party, an attractive young fashion journalist. She hadn’t uttered a word since she’d sat down.
Ever the optimist, I’d attributed her silence at first to sagacity. But then I began to notice that the silence was accompanied by this ferocious body language. She was bored, bored, bored, it said. Bored with this life, bored by the bores she was having to sit with, bored to agonising death by two-star Michelin restaurants. Occasionally a visible little shudder and a roll of an eye would announce that her boredom was now tempered by disgust — with the silly shape of her bread roll, perhaps, or a waiter’s fatuous solicitousness. It was like sharing a dining table with Chernobyl nuclear power station and surrounding exclusion zone, within which nothing can grow or flourish.
After the remains of the ravioli and gold had been cleared away the conversation, such as it was, flagged, and then failed. We were sitting there like stuck pigs, hoping that someone was going to say something, when the head waiter appeared and charmingly wondered aloud whether we all ate meat. The fashion journalist then cleared her throat as though she was about to say something. It was thrilling — like hearing a corpse speak — and we listened attentively. ‘I don’t eat red meat,’ she quacked. The head waiter spread his arms and performed an elegant little pirouette in celebration of the fact. ‘Of course. Very wise,’ he said, then he glided away.
Another awkward silence. Then one of our party, the manager of a vineyard, a keen cyclist, gamely delivered a monologue on the subject of doping in cycling, towards the end of which another round of dishes with lids was placed in front of us by the waiters. ‘Veal, foie gras and truffle,’ announced the head waiter as the lids were ceremoniously removed. Meat, pâté and mushroom were in a neat oval-shaped stack resembling the layers of a cake. Lovely jubbly. I was about to dig in when the fashion journalist started quacking again. ‘I don’t eat red meat,’ she said. ‘I don’t eat red meat.’ The head waiter hurried back and anxiously bent low and near, the better to fully comprehend the nature of this woman’s quacks. ‘But I don’t eat red meat,’ she repeated. ‘But, madam, veal is white meat,’ said the head waiter humbly. ‘It’s not. It’s red meat. And I don’t eat red meat.’ Quack quack quack quack. Bowing low, the head waiter removed the offending article from her sight and spirited it away. She wasn’t even slightly embarrassed.
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