As soon as Spago
Beverly Hills opened, an amuse bouche—often the miso cone—became a tradition. A
trio of amuse bouche arrived in quick succession, season specific, for Spago’s
menus always followed the seasons. You’d never find blueberries from Chile in
December. Truthfully, the billionaire
Marvin Davis could get out-of-season fruit whenever he wanted since he didn’t
believe in winter, summer, fall or spring; he lived only in Marvin time and
assumed others did too. Once Mr. D, as
we called him, travelled to Houston in the morning to check on his oil company
and returned to L.A. that evening just in time for dinner. I’d heard Houston was struck by severe
thunderstorms that day, so I asked, “Mr. D., how was the weather?”
“What’s weather?” he replied, and it struck me
then: Of course he had no sense of weather. He moved from air conditioned house
to garage to air conditioned limo, to private plane in private hangar, to
Houston hangar, to new air conditioned limo, to garage to air conditioned
office. Mark Twain once famously said,
“Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it, but
I realized in that moment that Marvin Davis had indeed done something about it.
At any rate, back
to the table. In early summer, the amuse bouche might be a delicate mini tart, filled
with the first of the season’s Junecrest peaches from the Masumoto family farm
just south of Fresno, topped with a dollop of mousse de foie gras marinated in sweet Moscato. This would be
followed by a confit of pork belly tucked inside a pâte feuilletée. Once the
guest had peeled himself off the ceiling and floated back to the table, he was
greeted by a petite tasse brimming
with Santa
Barbara sea urchin pot de creme illuminated
by a wasabi cream and osetra caviar. Sometimes
I watched a guest and imagined he must be wondering if he ought to eat it or
sell it to the highest bidder at Sotheby’s for the dish is that beautiful, and
the very moment the urchin touches tongue, . The taste rockets the taste buds
to the fourth dimension where time stands still and Cher looks young.
As the guest comes to, waiter,
sommelier, assistant sommelier and manager are staging glasses for the first
course of the evening. Sometimes a
guest’s eyes might wander to glance at the big star who just entered the
restaurant or to gaze at Wolfgang Puck standing just across the room despite
having appeared live that very morning on Good
Morning America. . “How the hell did
he get back in time for dinner?” a guest might ask herself. “He was in New York
this morning and now he’s signing a stack of cookbooks for one large table,
posing for a photo with another.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Barbara
Lazaroff, designer and partner (soon to be Puck's estranged wife), appears and
works her way around the room. She’s
directing busboys who carry a huge, booth-like chair into the main dining room
and set it at a large, round table. From
a side door an enormous man enters; he’s accompanied by two burly men and a
petite lady, obviously the man’s his wife dressed to the nines in a fabulous
St. John knit. At that moment Sydney
Poitier appears around the corner, joined by Jackie Collins and Bob
Newhart! Barbara embraces them all. And as I watched I always heard the Spago
refrain playing in my mind: Live! Love! Eat!
No comments:
Post a Comment