French Lessons by Peter Mayle

Author:Peter Mayle [Mayle, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781400077724
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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