French Lessons (14 page)

It wasn’t the first time I had heard the
Chinese accused of shady practices. The truffle scam had caused a surge of
outrage, and there had been talk of Chinese attempts to infiltrate the frog
market. Conveniently overlooked, of course, was the fact that foreign truffle
shysters and frog smugglers need the cooperation of French partners. Imagine a
salesman from Beijing, his sample case bulging with almost genuine truffles and
grade A French-type frogs. Would he pass unnoticed as he wandered through the
corridors of French gastronomy? I doubt it, no matter how fluently he spoke the
language.

But Chinese ingenuity didn’t stop at truffles and
frogs’ legs. After excavating in several pockets, Maurin found a rumpled
newspaper clipping that he passed across the table. “Foie gras,” he
said in a voice laden with gloom. “Now they’re making foie
gras.”

While he consoled himself with the carafe, I read the
article. Two enterprising gentlemen, Mr. Chan and Mr. Wu, had recently set up a
goose farm in the county of Hepu, just north of China’s border with
Vietnam. A stupendous goose farm, with a potential production capacity of more
than a thousand tons a year of the real thing—goose foie gras, rather
than the much more common and less expensive duck liver. This, according to the
journalist’s research, was nearly twice as much as current French
production.

I finished reading and looked up, to see Maurin shaking his
head.
“Alors?”
he said, raising both hands and letting
them fall to the table with a dispirited thump. “Where will it
stop?”

We were now alone at the table. Our neighbors, the lovers,
had left, joined at the hip as they squeezed together through the door—on
their way, I liked to think, to one of the piles of mattresses, now that they
had dealt with the preliminaries over lunch. I had run out of questions, and
Maurin was showing signs of fatigue brought on by Chinese infiltration and one
Gewürz too many. He was going to take a siesta before returning to the
festivities. We made one of those convivial after-lunch arrangements, genuinely
meant but seldom carried out, to meet at the same place the following year for
another few dozen. I left him adjusting his cap against the glare of the sun,
and we lurched off in opposite directions.

Back at the hotel that
evening, I took from my pocket a shell I’d kept as a souvenir and washed
it three times, according to correct procedure. Like my shirt, it still had a
residual whiff of garlic. Looking at the shell, which was perfectly designed
for its function as a mobile home and beautifully striped in shades of caramel,
I wondered who had been the first human ever to peer inside such a shell at the
living contents and decide it was edible. In the raw, snails don’t
instantly make your mouth water. They don’t have an overpoweringly
appetizing smell. Their color and texture are not to everybody’s taste.
And yet some brave soul took a bite and pronounced it good. Was it raging
hunger, or merely curiosity?

Greeks and Romans are often given the
credit for making gastronomic discoveries, but perhaps this time it was a
prehistoric entrepreneur from farther east. Maybe that was it: the early,
tentative stirrings of the Chinese Connection. An honorable ancestor of Mr.
Chan or Mr. Wu, having sampled his first juicy dozen somewhere in the
snail-rich fields of coastal China and finding them delicious, might have
sensed an export opportunity:
Escargots de Shanghai,
preferably
accompanied by a bottle of Great Wall Chinese rosé. Alas, we shall never
know.

Undressing for Lunch

Long, long ago, when the idle rich deserved their
description and had time and servants to spare, it was customary to change for
cocktails and dinner after a day of country pursuits. “Let’s get
out of these wet clothes,” as Robert Benchley used to say, “and
into a dry martini.” And so damp tweeds, sodden fishing trousers, muddy
plus fours, hacking jackets redolent of the stable—all were put aside, to
be replaced by evening wear that had been sponged clean after the previous
night’s soup stains and laid out by the valet.

In due course,
this elitist ritual came to the attention of restaurant owners, alert, then as
now, to the commercial advantages of attracting wealthy appetites. Their
response—presumably an attempt to make the upper classes feel at home
even when they ventured out—was to invent the restaurant dress code. It
was decreed that a man should not be allowed to enjoy a meal in public unless
he was properly groomed and outfitted—that is, with a suit and tie,
respectable fingernails, and clean shoes.

Time passed and standards
were relaxed, although not everywhere. As we all know, many of today’s
more ornate and expensive restaurants still insist that their male customers
wear a jacket and tie. But not, I have noticed, in France. Here, in this most
fashion-conscious of countries, the clothes worn in even the best restaurants
often strike the foreign visitor as surprisingly casual. Famous establishments
fairly twinkling with stars, where you might expect the clients to be dressed
at least as formally as the junior waiters, wouldn’t dream of turning you
away if you happened to show up without a tie. As for the humiliating edict
that allows you through the door providing you agree to wear a borrowed
tie—normally a greasy relic selected from the manager’s collection
of castoffs—this is something that would never occur in a good French
restaurant.

But nowhere in France has the dress code been
adjusted—or indeed tossed aside altogether—with such eye-popping
abandon as at Le Club 55, a restaurant on Pampelonne beach, a few kilometers
south of Saint-Tropez.

I had heard many reports about Club 55 over the
years, all of them good. A place of great charm, so everyone said, where you
could eat simple food and watch the boats at sea. It sounded delightful. But it
was a long drive from home, and the thought of the summer traffic on the
coast—often a solid, throbbing clot from Marseille to Monaco—had
always put my wife and me off. Until one hot morning in July when duty called,
disguised as our friend Bruno. He and his wife, Janine, live in the hills
behind Saint-Tropez, and they share my fondness for extended lunches.

Bruno began his phone call on a literary note. “Still pretending to
write?” he said. “What is it this time?”

I told him I
was doing research for a book that would include sections on fairs and
festivals connected with food and drink, the more unusual the better. Frogs, I
said, and truffles. Blood sausage, snails, tripe. That sort of thing.

“Ah,” he said, “festivals. Well, there’s a good one
down here, as long as you don’t mind a little bare flesh. The
fête des nanas.
”

“You
mean …”

“Girls, my friend, girls. Girls of all
ages, many of them wearing not much more than a handkerchief. A glorious sight
on a sunny day. Better come soon, before the weather turns chilly and they put
their clothes back on.”

Somehow, it didn’t sound like an
event that would have an official place in guidebooks or calendars of cultural
highlights, but it did seem worth a visit. I have known Bruno for many years,
and his judgment in these matters is impeccable. “Where does it
happen?” I asked.

“Club
Cinquante Cinq,
every day,
except if it’s raining. I don’t think the girls like getting their
sunglasses wet. You really should come and do a bit of research. Never have so
many worn so little. The food’s nice, too.”

Later that
month, as our car crawled along behind a caravan on the road that corkscrews
down from La Garde-Freinet to the coast, I wondered how any establishment was
able not only to survive but to remain fashionable over several decades. Club
55, according to the brief history Bruno had given me, qualified as a
grandfather among Riviera restaurants.

It had been started in 1955 by
Geneviève and Bernard de Colmont, whose previous claim to fame had been
as pioneers—they were the first French people to go down the Colorado
River through the Grand Canyon by canoe. Returning to France, they bought a
patch of Pampelonne beach. In those days, Saint-Tropez was little more than a
fishing village with a couple of cafés, and Club 55 was little more than
a hut serving grilled sardines to friends and acquaintances of the de Colmonts.
(Any strangers they didn’t like, they turned away, telling them it was a
private club.) Madame was an accomplished cook, so the menu expanded and the
restaurant flourished, attracting a clientele that liked fresh grilled fish and
a bottle of honest rosé, with the added pleasure of eating free from the
encumbrance of too many clothes.

Then, in 1956, came Brigitte Bardot,
Roger Vadim, and the film that transformed Saint-Tropez. Vadim was shooting
And God Created Woman
there, and he had a film crew that, being
French, would mutiny unless they were well fed. Could Madame de Colmont provide
lunch every day? She did. Word spread, and, over the years, the world came.
Geneviève’s son Patrice took over the management of the restaurant
in the mid-eighties, and he and his staff have been run off their feet every
summer since.

At the time of my visit, Club 55 was in its forty-fifth
year, a considerable age for any restaurant, and a near miracle considering its
location and the nature of its clientele. The south of France generally, and
the hyperchic area around Saint-Tropez in particular, doesn’t seem to
encourage venerable institutions. There are, of course, the old men who play
boules outside the Colombe d’Or, the Monegasque royal family, and the
casino at Monte-Carlo, but these are exceptions. Change is more common, with
boutiques, restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs changing hands and often
changing names after a few hard but lucrative years.

And who can blame
the frazzled and exhausted owners for selling? Their customers, the crowds that
cluster on the coast each season, are not the sweetest or best-mannered of
people. In fact, if you believe half of what you hear, most of them are
monsters. This is held to be true regardless of nationality, although I’m
told that the Russians are now competing with the Germans, the British, and
even the Parisians as the least-loved visitors on the coast. “It’s
not just that the Russians these days have obscene amounts of cash,” one
local bar owner said. “Nobody down here minds that. But they always look
so damned miserable
.
And after a while, they get drunk and start
crying. It must be something in the genes.”

But it seems to me
that maudlin behavior in bars is a minor character flaw compared with some of
the other vices practiced by fun-loving visitors. Arrogance, stinginess,
impatience, lack of consideration, bullying, dishonesty in settling bills,
petty theft (ashtrays, towels, crockery, bathrobes), the cleaning of shoes on
the hotel curtains—all of these and worse make running a haven of
hospitality on the Côte d’Azur a severe test of patience and
restraint. And yet here was Club 55, still at it after all these years.

Turning off the narrow sandy road into the area behind the restaurant, you
might imagine that you’d misread the map and ended up in California, the
spiritual home of the valet parker. Young men are in attendance to save you the
trouble of finding a spot for your car—young men in snappy shorts and
reflective sunglasses, with the most perfect, even, burnished tans, shunting
cars around with noisy nonchalance. Our elderly Peugeot was consigned to the
rear of the parking area so that it wouldn’t lower the tone of the front
row, where a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of toys—Jaguars,
Porsches, and Mercedes—were cooking in the sun.

The restaurant
was still only half-full, but we found Janine and Bruno already installed, wine
bucket at the ready. It was one o’clock—early for the real action,
as Bruno said, but he thought it was important that we were well settled before
the ladies began to arrive.
Les nanas,
apparently, prefer to eat a
little later, and they wouldn’t be in evidence much before two. So we had
time to take a look at our surroundings.

What first struck me was the
light, a beautiful diffused glow of sunshine filtered through bleached canvas
awnings that were stretched across whitewashed wooden beams. The glow was
reflected by pale blue tablecloths, creating a most flattering effect on the
complexions of the people around us. They all looked impossibly healthy.
Waiters and waitresses, crisp in their whites, distributed menus and chilled
bottles. Looking beyond the few stunted but tenacious trees that had taken root
among the terra-cotta tiles between the tables, we could see the sharp deep
blue glitter of the Mediterranean and the profile of an immense triple-decker
motor yacht, doubtless with many glamorous passengers aboard. So far, so
good.

Patrice stopped at our table to say hello to Janine and Bruno,
and to cast a professional glance at the wine level in our glasses. Affable,
worldly, relaxed, and possessed of a remarkable memory for names and faces, he
must have seen the entire cast of Côte d’Azur characters come and
go over the years—movie stars and politicians, financiers, gunrunners,
dictators on the lam, illicit couples, dilapidated aristocrats, the models and
photographers of the moment, gigolos and shady ladies. Sooner or later, they
all drop in at Club 55 to look and to be looked at, sometimes hiding
conspicuously behind oversized sunglasses.