“Please don’t wake me from this dream!” I said out loud to my husband while eating the brilliant meal in front of me, prepared by my live-in chef. Uh-huh, you heard correctly. My private chef.
Let me take you back five days. I received a late-night email. It was from an old friend, Olivia. She told me her son was here in Los Angeles from London (where they live) and that the minute he arrived, he had a bust-up with his girlfriend. She said that he could use a friendly face. I answered immediately: “Of course, have him call me.”
First call the following day was Oscar, whom I’ve never met. In fact, I have not seen his mother in thirty years. Since he was already in Venice, I asked him to meet me at one of my favorite restaurants, Gjelina on Abbot Kinney. My husband Michael agreed to join us. Oscar, looking lost and forlorn, told us he had planned to take his now ex-girlfriend to Valentine’s dinner here at this same restaurant the following night. We offered our home to Oscar for the rest of his vacation. I didn’t think we would be too intriguing, but later that day he told me that eating lunch with us was the most fun he had had so far in Los Angeles. And when he told us he was a chef, I nearly screamed. Actually, I did, but only internally.
Though I am not a foodie, I like watching chefs on TV. They are the
new "rock stars" and their antics are often equal amounts amusing,
terrible and inspirational (in the kitchen, that is). It's hard to
imagine a city's food lovers more connected to a chef than Los Angeles
is to Ludo Lefebvre. Trying to get a reservation to his tri-annual,
6-week pop-up restaurant is harder than getting VIP passes backstage to
U2. (I'm guessing, but I don't think I'm far off.) When out dining in LA, the conversation, if you're with passionate
diners, inevitably turns to the hottest local chefs and eventually to LudoBites - how many you've been to (3),
which incarnations (3.0, 4.0 and 6.0) and how much time/how many
computers you had running trying to get one of the elusive reservations
on OpenTable…before it crashed for those trying to get into 5.0 and 6.0.
This last time for 007 (back downtown at Gram & Papas), it went off without a hitch – that is if you
got into the system in the first 2 minutes, which by the grace of God my
Man did.
At our store, The Green Spot, in Maine, we seek out locally made, unusual products like freshly gathered honey, artisan maple syrup or rare apple cider made with heirloom apples. But my favorite is a handmade butter that is such a treat melted with lobsters, slathered on the breads that we bake or the sugar-and-gold corn picked that morning.
Oh those personal chefs of Palm Beach – those white jacketed, croc-shod, Bluetooth-eared, clubby bunch that troll the aisles of our local supermarket! Is it simple envy that knowing they wield a knife better than I that has made me feel less than human as I wheel my cart past them? Probably. But, today there was victory! Today, There was Deliverance! Equality – nay – Superiority! (They don’t have to know I usually cut my finger when I cut a bagel – and you don’t have to tell them!)
Once Anthony Bourdain left The Food Network in a trail of acrimonious dust, he started a second television career on The Travel Channel. The show (”No Reservations”) was better (because, among other things, they allowed Anthony to be his acerbic, outrageous self) but he was gone from my life because the Travel Channel was not available from our cable company. We ordered episodes from Netflix, took them out of the library, and once, in a media coup that rivalled the day when my brother and I tuned in what we believed to be “porn”on the TV in the living room by fiddling rabbit ears and vertical hold, we found one episode of “No Reservations” on “On Demand,” and watched it with the fervor and intensity appropriate for a bootleg copy of Tommy and Pamela.