Good restaurants: places to go for glorious food, fine wine and, now that even some of the better ones have become less stuffy, a welcome for the patter of tiny feet. But how tiny? ...
For my most extravagant night out in the UAE, I checked into a fancy hotel and booked a table for two to enjoy the special (and suitably expensive) Valentine’s Day dinner.
The quality of comfort and service was superb, as was, so it seemed, the food. Unfortunately, something on the menu disagreed fundamentally with my wife, producing the nastiest bout of food poisoning she had ever known.
The best-run, cleanest and most exquisitely stocked of restaurant kitchens can still be vulnerable to the occasional, unidentifiably dodgy prawn, and we were genuinely impressed by the hotel’s concern and response when we mentioned it to staff next morning.
Indeed, it is probably true that you can ask anyone in professional catering and expect to be served a feast, if that is the correct word, of hard-luck stories.
At the end of a splendid meal in the pretty French village of Bormes-les-Mimosas (pictured), up in the hills of the Var above the Mediterranean, the owner, Pascale, shrugged off obvious fatigue (we were her last customers and it had been a long day) and sat down to talk. Somehow, conversation turned to restaurant mishaps.
There are surely few people who could not offer at least one way of ending the family of wisecracks that begins: “Waiter, waiter, there’s a fly in my soup ...”
The one that springs instantly to my mind is: “Hush, or everyone will want one.” But I had not previously come across Pascale’s example: the waiter simply scoops the insect out of the bowl with a spoon and walks off, exclaiming: “Not any more, there isn’t.”
But then, said Pascale, this happened in real life. She also recalled a gourmet dinner that left her so ill and her throat so fiery that she could barely swallow water for three days. And a posh Sunday lunch where a friend felt obliged to inform the maître d’ that he might wish to check whether other plates of salad contained, as hers had, a stink bug, charmingly named after the foul odour of the substance secreted by glands in its thorax.
On reflection, the friend may have felt she acted with remarkable restraint by doing no more than to offer uncritical advice, since she had just crunched into her side dish’s unwelcome added ingredient.
At least Pascale was smiling at the memory. So we told her our story of the wasp, no less perfectly fried than the eggs and hash browns, once served to us in Yorkshire as part of a fuller English breakfast than had been ordered.
But back to the UAE and that unromantic St Valentine’s experience. The hotel, as I have observed, was as good as gold, conducting exhaustive tests to ensure hygiene standards in their kitchen were up to scratch and also inviting us back for a complimentary meal. Again, it was delicious. And again my poor wife, normally of such robust constitution, was sick. We didn’t say a word, save to offer polite thanks before creeping away into the night.
* From my East/West column in The National, Abu Dhabi.
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