by Jeffrey Meyers

Rereading James Salter’s delightful Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days reminded me of the best meals in my life, when the food was excellent and the atmosphere and people were even more important.  At their finest, these dinners seemed to transport me for a few hours into a higher realm of existence.

In the summer of 1956, when I was seventeen, I lived with a family in Genoa.  I learned Italian and went to the opera; tried eggplant, artichokes and squid for the first time; and drank wine with meals.  Every day I ate like a lord.  On one special occasion somewhat illustrious friends were invited, floors and silverware polished, tablecloths ironed and flowers brought in.  Signora Innocenti took elaborate care when buying the ingredients and preparing the food.  Her teenaged son, Mauro, and I were told to go out for a passeggiata and stay out of the way until the guests were due.  As olives rolled in their dish and grissini spiked up from the table, we started with pasta carbonara, ate fish with the head attached and skin crisp, thin slices of sautéed veal, tiramisu for dessert, and drank Montecatini wine from the family vineyards in the father’s native town.  The ambience was warm, the company congenial, the conversation lively, and I was also treated like a valued guest.

In Sardinia the shaded outdoor country inn was filled with hearty diners.  The long-haired, swarthy waiters wore red vests, wide cummerbunds and puffed trousers, and carried the food on trays made of wavy tree bark.  An accordion played and people began to sing in the local unintelligible dialect.  Two slight contretemps marred the perfectly grilled wild boar.  In those pre-credit-card-days, I could not cash a traveler’s check on Sunday, was afraid I might not have enough lire to pay the bill and had to calculate carefully before ordering.  Since the local wines were unfamiliar, I asked for an Italian Chianti.  This request offended the honor of the island and the waiter haughtily replied, “Noi serviamo qui solo vini di Sardegna!”  Fearing a stiletto in my back, I quickly agreed to his recommendation.

The approach to a restaurant can sometimes be as attractive as the place itself.  The 60-mile drive from Madrid to Segovia and through the Sierra de Guadarrama (the setting of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls), has the most attractive scenery in Spain.  The gentle uphill stroll from the main plaza of the town leads straight to the spectacular dreamlike castle.  Candido’s restaurant is placed in a half-timbered house and set beneath the towering Roman aqueduct.  Its interior brick walls are covered with colorful pottery, old cooking implements and bullfight posters.  The long bar, with a leather edge for comfortable leaning, is piled high with tapas.  The local specialty is displayed in the front windows of all the restaurants.  The small suckling piglet, with sharp ears and snout nose, has been detached from the sow and the litter, and roasted on a wood fire till its skin is crackling and meat juicy.  Carved at the table, it’s served with fried potatoes and a chocolate tart for dessert.  I drank a bottle of tinto Marques de Riscal, the label adorned with medals won in old wine competitions and the bottle caged in thin golden wire.

While writing the life of Wyndham Lewis I was invited to dinner by the Canadian High Commissioner in London.  Paul Martin had been a local politician when Lewis had spent the war years in Toronto and painted a portrait of Martin’s wife Eleanor.  In the elegant room, where foreign diplomats were entertained in high style, a butler with white gloves served creamed scallops in a shell, Chateaubriand Steak and chocolate mousse, cooked by a professional chef and accompanied by my favorite Pouilly-Fuissé.  The Martins addressed each other as Mommy and Daddy in a homely affectionate style that clashed with the grand surroundings and haut cuisine.  Trying to take notes of our talk at the same time as I consumed the food, I learned that forty years later Eleanor was still angry about Lewis’ rude behavior while painting her portrait.  To provoke her and liven her up, he made cynical and offensive attacks on everything the young lady believed in: patriotism, the royal family, important politicians and respected military leaders.  Though she hated Lewis’ Right-wing views, she remained silent and, as in her portrait, clasped her hands tightly on her lap to control her anger and revulsion.  The painting became a constant reminder of her unpleasant encounter with Lewis.

My genial host Dr. Bernard Meyer, educated at Harvard and at Cornell Medical School and the author of a brilliant psychoanalytical biography of Joseph Conrad, had everything.  He was silver-haired, handsome and intelligent; sophisticated and witty; warm and generous; successful and wealthy; a talented pianist and art collector.  Like a Moghul, he lived in grand style, with Old Master engravings and Rembrandt drawings on the walls of his East Side townhouse and his summer house in Provincetown.  He was a great teacher of medicine, was happily married and had three bright children.

One evening in New York he invited me to discuss my essay on Oscar Wilde with a group of his fellow psychiatrists.  He was a connoisseur of food and wine, and dinner was served by a silent uniformed maid and next to a spiral staircase that led upstairs.  After the lavish meal and before the others arrived, he gave me a glass of exquisite plum liqueur that I’d never tasted before and conspiratorially whispered, “we’ll save the Mirabelle for ourselves and not give them any.”  Bernard treated me as if we were equals and old colleagues, and the drink and dinner brought us close together.  He was my ideal father and the most impressive man I’ve ever met.

Disastrous dining was etched more vividly in my memory.  Coming back from the beach in Malibu on my first date with my future wife, I noticed a restaurant with a familiar name: Perino’s.  Though not properly dressed I thought we’d try it, but I refused to allow the parking attendant near my new Triumph sports car.  We boldly entered, sat down uneasily and were shocked by the forbidding prices on the tall stiff menus.  Surrounded by obsequious waiters, retreat was impossible.  After a whispered talk about how much money we could pool, we dared not order a single hamburger for two people.  We commanded, instead, the cheapest things on the menu and beat a hasty retreat.  By serendipity in that enormous city, the wealthy family that Val had stayed with when she first arrived in Los Angeles were sitting at a nearby table and thought I was entertaining her in high style.  We missed the tempting dessert, but stopped on the way home to buy two ice cream cones with the small change that was left.

Excruciating dinners with university colleagues in Boulder, Colorado—except those given by the Greeks and Romanians—featured boring company and bad food (including popcorn for dessert).  On one notorious occasion given by a female couple, the very proper partner knocked over a glass of red wine and kept on apologizing profusely.  When she finally calmed down, a boorish guest said, “Pass the bread, the dry part if you please.”  To add to the drama, another guest broke a glass and hoped it wasn’t valuable.  The mannish partner shouted “it was very valuable and you’re a fool!”  When asked about her specialty in social history, she hoisted up her trousers and barked out, “Manners!  What’s yours?”  Since I had not committed a social gaffe, they invited me again and I asked, “what did I ever do to you?”

A man I met in the Harvard library, who shared my interest in T. E. Lawrence, surprisingly invited me to a dinner that would be expertly cooked by his wife.  I arrived in the crossfire of their fierce argument that ended as the outraged wife ascended a ladder to the loft.  During the next few starving hours the husband, tried to lure his wife down with many feeble apologies, pleas of hunger and threats of future punishment.  But she never reappeared.  After I’d eaten all the peanuts and some paper napkins, and fortified myself with a whole bottle of wine, the host, pinch-hitting at midnight, under-cooked a rubbery shark and served it slithering on the plate.

Once invited to dinner by a tennis partner I scarcely knew, I got into a fiery conflict with his drunken wife.  She vehemently insisted that I was obliged to give a copy of my Lewis book to everyone who had helped me and been cited in the Acknowledgements. I said that 40 people had helped me, the book cost $30 and I couldn’t possibly afford to send out $1,200 worth of books plus packing and postage.  Instead of accepting my explanation, she became even more furious and ordered me, in the middle of the meal, to get out of the house.  When I reached home, had a needful snack and fell asleep, the phone woke me up at midnight.  The husband had forced his wife to make a blubbering apology, which was even worse than her original offense.

An Indian neighbor in Berkeley, while her marriage was disintegrating, asked me to a horribly tense farewell dinner before her husband departed forever.  As I walked around the side of the house to the outdoor porch, I saw the husband ruining the barbecue.  He burned the meat and under cooked the fish that was still pink and raw in the middle.  I noticed there were some still edible sausages, but his ravenous teenaged daughters hijacked them before they reached the table.  The girls grabbed the wet Indian food with their fingers, gobbled it down and then did their stretching exercises next to the table while waiting to snatch the pudding.  During dinner the dark-skinned wife said, “Everyone thinks I’m Mexican.”  Moving her hands from her head over her bulging belly and down to her waist, she declared, “Before the daughters, I was half this size.”  After polishing off an entire bottle of white wine, she exclaimed, “Now red!”

In Rasht, Iran, in the waning days of the Shah, I found myself on the shore of the Caspian Sea.  Seizing the chance of  a lifetime, I asked the hotel clerk whether to buy the famous local caviar, sold at bargain prices by a street vendor who kept it on ice, or more safely and expensively from the hotel.  With alarming frankness, he told me, “Here is Hotel Cheat!  Cheating hotel!  More better you buy in street.”  Tasting it first, I bought half a pound of glistening black caviar, which came in a cold tin container.  With no refrigerator, I planned to eat the first half, keep the rest under cold water in my sink and, after a nap, finish it off in a final assault.  I carried it with a pile of flat bread to the beach and gorged contentedly, gazing at the sparkling azure sea as several dogs slept quietly nearby.  Suddenly, I noticed that they were actually dead and the caviar didn’t taste very good.  Surroundings and company made a great difference to the food.

Jeffrey Meyers has had 33 of his 54 books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  He’s recently published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014), Robert Lowell in Love (2015) and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy (2018).  He is now completing a book about his writer-friend James Salter.