Eating as art

The Waldhotel Sonnora in the tiny town of Wittlich, Germany, is seen from its rear garden. Waldhotel translates as "forest hotel." (Don Dale 1995 photo)

La mejor salsa del mundo es la hambre.

So wrote Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 400 years ago in "Don Quixote": Hunger is the best sauce in the world.

It's true. I can remember a dinner of chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans that I ate in basic training in the USAF in the summer of 1966. It sticks in my mind because I was ravenous. We had just returned from a week of camping out in the Texas boonies, eating C rations and drinking coffee boiled over an open fire. That chicken-fried steak in the chow hall was the first real meal I'd had in seven days, and it was powerfully delicious.

In my previous post I wrote about eating at a Michelin two-star restaurant, Au Crocodile, in Strasbourg, France. On that 1995 trip, my friend Walter and I ate at three Michelin-starred restaurants in three countries.

The 1995 Michelin guide noted that it awarded one, two or three stars to restaurants of "particularly fine quality" and cautions that patrons "will pay accordingly." One star goes to very good restaurants in their category, two stars go to restaurants featuring "excellent cooking, worth a detour," and three stars are awarded for "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey."

The three Michelin-starred restaurants we ate at were the previously mentioned Au Crocodile, the Waldhotel Sonnora in Wittlich, Germany, and Christophe in Amsterdam, Holland.

All three meals were impressive, probably the best I have ever been served, and all were ridiculously expensive by my standards, in the range of $100 to $200 each in 1995 dollars, which is about $150 to $300 today. Each, however, was worth what we paid.

But I can remember only bits and pieces of each experience. I should have kept a journal.

Our choice of Christophe in Amsterdam was based on a recommendation from a friend of Walter's partner, who was in Amsterdam to conduct "La Boheme." If I'm recalling correctly, Christophe merited one Michelin star. The restaurant, nestled along one of the city's famed canals, was nothing special as far as interior design is concerned, but I do remember the meal being amazing. Walter and I ordered the same entrée, which, if memory serves, was beef. What I do remember vividly was the delicious sauce. Both of us puzzled over its distinctive ingredient, but we couldn't quite put our finger on it. We later found out from our waiter: ground olives. Amazing.

In Strasbourg, we stumbled upon Au Crocodile by accident as we were wandering through the area around the cathedral. We stopped to read the menu in the window, and the proprietress came out to greet us. She welcomed us to come inside to look and told us that, yes, we could get a reservation for that evening. I recall little about the meal except for the staggeringly delicious selection of local cheeses. I had never before tasted such cheeses. I do remember that the table was set with pink linen and heavy silver. When I reached for the sugar bowl, it was so unexpectedly heavy that I almost dropped it.

And I recall the quiet, elderly couple at the table next to us -- she in a mauve print dress with coordinated hat and gloves, he in a dark three-piece pinstriped suit, and both looking like elegant extras from a 1930s French film. He smoked throughout the meal, ashes dribbling down his front. I was captivated.

Our final gourmet stop was a restaurant for which we'd made reservations via fax long before leaving the States. It was at the Waldhotel Sonnora in the tiny German town of Wittlich, not far from the town where I'd been stationed in the USAF 30 years before. I do not remember whether it had two or three stars. Here, unlike the other two restaurants, none of the dining-room staff spoke English. To help us decipher the menu, the maître d' summoned a young woman from the kitchen who was clearly embarrassed to be brought into the dining room. Her English was passable, about on a par with my German, but she was eager to help.

I recall little of the gastronomically spectacular meal except for the frog legs. They were excellent. And, yes, they tasted like fried chicken. I do recall that we ordered extravagantly expensive port to finish off our evening. We took our glasses out to the terrace overlooking the garden and sipped slowly and talked quietly in the night.

Those three meals were a decided anomaly for me. I have never before or since eaten so well, so elegantly, and so expensively. And I shall probably never do so again. But the memories are priceless.