Today I had a taste of my old life. The one where I floated out of a taxi with a scarf trailing behind me like Isadora Duncan and wafted into a Michelin starred restaurant my hand already outstretched like for the glass of champagne, lipstick carefully blotted ready for the air kiss of insincerity, waistband already loosened for the forthcoming meal.
Publishing, or at least the other end of publishing from the one at which I currently scrabble, is all about the lunch meeting, but I rarely do more than eat a sandwich on the top of the bus. But today was the long awaiting visit to the newly refurbished Connaught where Helene Darroze takes over the restaurant, complete with a lavish refurbishment of both the hotel and the dining room.
Sadly my entrance didn't quite live up to expectations. For a start it was raining. Monsoon weather in central London meaning no taxis and the Primark umbrella not quite up to the job of keeping the rain off, breathing in and out like a lung, a wet lung, its spindles straining to breaking point with every gust of sodden wind. I was also wearing a coat that makes me look like an Emo being that it's black and long, and shower-proof which apparently, does not mean waterproof, but merely that it will keep off a little light misting but soak up the rest like a slab of white bread on a bowl of soup. So I arrived soaked, flushed with the triumph of finally finding a taxi after I'd yomped half way to Bond Street, through puddles and the spray of other, more succesful hailers who smiled smugly at me through the steamed up windows of their own snug cabs. My forearms were both wet where the rain had trickled down the inside of my coat, and my little red shoes were black with mud and water.
Elegant indeed.
Nevertheless Paula led me into the dining room and graciously let me have the better seat facing into the room.
'You're entering a different world now,' she said, 'leave everything else outside.' I thought she meant cares and worries but in fact she was talking about the dripping mac and the buckled umbrella. I don't think India Mahdavi's interior design has been scotchguarded against the British climate. Mind you I expect most guests will drift downstairs with a tiara and a long frock. Followed by their wives.
I'd forgotten how terribly jaded I had become when I was doing this sort of thing full time. How tired, so tired, of all the soupcons of this and demi-tasse of that, and overly decorated plates in odd shapes with teeny weeny bits of food, of froth and foam, and creamy shot glasses with air and herb fronds and yet here I was about to land in the mothership of such things.
Imagine then the relief of seeing a little gold trolley shuggling towards us like a fat woman on tiny heels, bearing a large red enamelled meat slicer, from which, with an airy swish and a turn of a handle, tissue thin slices of ham appeared from the rare black Bigorre pig. Immediately I get filled with the same sort of excitement that other women feel in shoe shops and which, I admit, kinda passes me by - mostly because I can't afford to indulge it. Instead I get it in Green Valley, the Lebanese supermarket next to the Synagogue in Marble Arch. Other women think oooh, handbags. I think oooooh, hummous.
Excitement = good.
Food = even gooder (that's a deliberate mistake - going for some style over grammar here).
My main dish was steak tournedos, that I haven't eaten for ten years since I had a horrible experience in a restaurant that has probably closed by now, if there's any justice, and during which my companion, a Magazine Editor upset me so much with his snide comments that I burst into tears at the table and walked out half way through the meal.
No crying this time.
I could go on, about the pre-dessert of lemon grass pannacotta, or the dessert which was everything you can think to do with chocolate except actually painting it on yourself and licking it off, or the cheese (my god the Stilton!) or the petit fours (ginger ice cream with praline) but what would be the point in rubbing salt (sea salt milled from the thighs of freshly toiling maidens in the Pyrenees) into the wound of your lunch time Pret a Manger sandwich?
It's cruel. Too cruel.
